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Painlessly Update FreeBSD

Posted by timothy on from the a-slight-pinch dept.

boarder8925 writes "Over at BSDnews, Steve Wingate has written an article on how to easily update FreeBSD. Wingate begins his article by saying, "One of the greatest advantages that *BSD has over other Unix variants is the cvsup/make world process. Unlike most Linux distributions it isn't necessary to wait months for a new version to be released for you to upgrade your system. The cvsup/make world process allows you to update your system at any time. I'm going to show you how to make the process as painless as possible." The article discusses the following: installing CVSup, choosing a cvsup server, configuring make.conf, and, finally, performing the upgrade. The piece is also available as a .pdf file."

3 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Re:NETCRAFT NOW CONFIRMS: *BSD IS DYING by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Is it really the first time you see a BSD is dying post?

  2. *BSD needs a new icon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    *BSD needs a new icon. Get rid of the devil. Use something like this, but without the clinton-era word balloon.

  3. Months? Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I wanted a new slackware-current system, but all I had were the 9.1 release cd's, from last year! What was I to do? I could download it from an ftp server and try to make a bootable iso inside Windows (all I had available), or try something else...

    I installed slackware linux 9.1 with the packages I wanted. Then I installed SWARET by downloading a tarball and using "installpkg". I edited swaret.conf to change the version of slackware from 9.1 to current, then I typed "swaret --update" to update the package database. "swaret --upgrade" downloaded all the new versions of the packages I installed in 9.1 from the closest mirror, installed them, and it was done.

    This didn't take months, it took 2 hours. Sorry *BSD, you smell bad.