It all started with my obsession to switch to FreeBSD from Manjaro Linux as my daily driver. But there were a few caveats! First, I couldn’t get Jetbrains’ IDEs to work… But fixed that. Then the other main stumbling block was getting Slack messenger to work on FreeBSD.
I found Weechat and the wee-slack plugin but I need to share my screen with clients – so no go. Then I thought about running doze or something in a VM and running Slack there! So I needed to get Virtualbox working.
I installed with pkg and tried to run it and found that my Qt library was out of date. So thinking that I could just install the new version I ran pkg install qt5. It installed version 5.13 but 5.12 still hung around. And I wasn’t able to remove it with pkg delete qt – that just removed version 5.12.
In a post outlining a similar problem I found at https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2018-May/089036.html Rod talked about painstakingly upgrading each Qt package. So I thought, “how could I automate this?”
Enter xargs. I ran pkg version qt5 | grep 5.12 > qt.txt and then piped that into pkg upgrade to upgrade the list with cat qt5.txt > xargs pkg upgrade -y and viola! It upgraded all the Qt packages :) Success – Virtualbox works!!
I hope this helps someone :)