Package management

The package manager

Prism relies on the pkgsrc technology, using the high-level pkgin utility, which can be simply defined as NetBSD's version of apt and dnf/yum. the default pkgin repository included is Joyent's pkgsrc EL7 x86_64 package host, which is the reason for which the host type will be occasionally report itself as x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu.

Updating the database

The entire package database can be updated (as root) with pkgin update. This will download the latest package repository index (pkg_summary.gz).

You can also update the local system repository, by running (as root) base-update.

System upgrade

• you can perform an almost full system upgrade (vast majority of the system will be updated by this) by running (as root) pkgin -y upgrade.

• you can also run base-upgrade, to only sync the local repository and update the core system. NOTE: manual unlinking of the kernel source from linux-lts is required.

Installing packages

• you can install packages either using BusyBox's dpkg and rpm utilities (be sure to add a parameter, which will ignore looking for dependencies).

• you can run (as root) pkgin -y install <package name>.

• you can also do (as root) base-install <package name>, to install a specific core package from the system repository without upgrading the full system.

Prism is based on GNU libc, which will allow you to install the vast majority of programs without installing compatibility libraries.

currently, the pkgsrc bootstrap script seems to be having issues with resolving dependencies, however the pkgsrc method will be included once the issue is resolved.