Hi users of EL6 based distributions,

I’m pleased to announce a new alternative binary package repository for EL6 x86_64. The aim is to provide a supplemental set of packages which may contain software not included in your base system.

These packages are based on pkgsrc, a cross-platform package manager.

In this initial release there are 13,152 packages available. For now I am specifically targetting EL6/x86_64 (the build host is CentOS 6.5)
to see what kind of interest in this. If there is reasonable interest I can produce packages for other targets based on popularity.

To install, download and unpack the bootstrap kit:

$ curl -s http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/packages/Linux/bootstrap/bootstrap-2014Q2-el6-x86_64.tar.gz | sudo tar -zxpf – -C /

Packages are self-contained under the /usr/pkg prefix:

$ PATH=$PATH:/usr/pkg/sbin:/usr/pkg/bin
$ MANPATH=$MANPATH:/usr/pkg/man

Included is the “pkgin” binary package manager, which has been designed to operate similar to yum/apt-get:

# Fetch latest database
$ sudo pkgin update

# Search for a package
$ pkgin search tmux

# Install it
$ sudo pkgin install tmux

# See what is available
$ pkgin avail | less

Further details and similar binary package sets for SmartOS/illumos and OSX can be found here:

http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/

Feedback is highly appreciated! Let me know if there is anything we can do to improve these packages, or if they are unwelcome. You can email me or @jperkin, or alternatively get involved in the pkgsrc community – our aim is to provide cross-platform packages for over 20
different operating systems from the same source tree.

Thanks,