Installing Anki on FreeBSD
Note: Written for FreeBSD 7.x series unless updated further.
The main issue with installing Anki on FreeBSD is that the stock install is missing lot of libraries for Qt4 and Python-qt4 plugins necessary to run it. You can download and install them utilizing either packages or ports:
Installing via Packages
For packages, download the Anki source from this website first, then follow these steps:
Run ./anki from the source repository, taking a note of what library is missing.
Use pkg_add to add the missing libraries. For example: pkg_add -r qt4 py25-qt4-*
- Repeat steps 1-2 until Anki runs.
Depending on what's missing, this could take multiple cycles until all missing libraries are installed and Anki runs. Anki works almost perfectly out of the box, except the terminal may flag frequent errors related to pysqlite versioning. This is a known bug and can be ignored, as stated on the Anki website, and will cause no degraded performance.
Installing via Ports
Anki is also available through the Ports collection via /usr/ports/games/anki. Before you install Anki, make sure your Ports tree is up to date using portsnap, then simply go to the directory and run the command make install clean. Unlike the packages method, the ports tree will install quite a large number of applications and libraries, including gcc4 among others.
Time Synchronization
One other issue to make it work is that time must be synchronized. If not, Anki will refuse to synchronize, so use ntpd as explained in the FreeBSD official handbook.