This is the FreeBSD Ports Collection. For an easy to use WEB-based interface to it, please see: http://www.freebsd.org/ports For general information on the ports collection, please see the FreeBSD Handbook which is available from: file://localhost/usr/share/doc/handbook/handbook.html (if you installed the doc distribution on your machine) Or: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ for the latest official version from FreeBSD-current. The section "The Ports Collection" will tell you how to use the ports and packages and the "Porting Applications" section describes how one can contribute to the ports collection. If you would like to search for a given port, you can do so easily by saying: make search key="" Which will generate a list of all ports matching . NOTE: This tree can GROW significantly in size during normal usage! The distribution tar files can and do accumulate in /usr/ports/distfiles, and the individual ports will also use up lots of space in their work subdirectories unless you remember to "make clean" after you're done building a given port. /usr/ports/distfiles can also be periodically cleaned without ill-effect, though if you don't have the original distribution tarball(s) for something on CDROM then you will need to pull it all over your network connection again if you ever try to build the associated port.