MidnightBSD Developer Journal

I recently setup a new system with the FreeBSD 9 32bit scanner.  I was able to get it to work on a modern 64bit system with a few caveats. 

As it's an old school FreeBSD package and not using the modern pkg, I extracted it at / and then removed the "+INSTALL, +DESC" and other + files from /. 

First, the binary requires libintl.so and libiconv.so which are external dependencies not included with the compat32 system in FreeBSD. Normally one would install some packages to get those. gettext-runtime and libiconv i think.  It would be nice if the binary was either static linked or at least mentioned these need to be installed.  You can get packages from a 32bit version of freebsd 10.x  or MidnightBSD 1.2.x for these and install them and it will just work.  

Second, since I was trying to run on a 64bit system, I had to install compat9x, compat8x and manually copy the above mentioned libraries into /usr/local/lib32/compat/ and then update the runtime path.  I set the following in /etc/rc.conf to get it to run easier

ldconfig32_paths="$ldconfig32_paths /usr/local/lib32/compat /usr/local/lib"

ldconfig_local32_dirs="$ldconfig_local32_dirs /usr/local/libdata/ldconfig"

Then I ran /etc/rc.d/ldconfig restart 

I found that I had to make two directories that are included in the +INSTALL script including one for license files and one for logging.  You'll see errors when running the tools that tell you what to make if you forget.  

I was then able to import the license file and startup the daemon using the rc.d script and then perform a manual scan.  

It would be really nice of the binary was static linked and also if a 64bit version could be created.  

I technically did this on a MidnightBSD 1.2 amd64 system, but it would also work on FreeBSD 10.x or 11.x.