Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2001 12:37:53 -0600 (CST) From: Ryan Thompson <ryan@sasknow.com> To: Clarence Brown <clabrown@granitepost.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What's "Best" upgrade path? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0108181221400.79405-100000@ren.sasknow.com> In-Reply-To: <000c01c127fb$ad28eea0$8f6896d1@granitepost.com>
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Hi Clarence, Clarence Brown wrote to freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG: > I have a FreeBSD v4.1 machine that was installed > from the August 2000 CD's. It's not currently > connected to the network. I'd like to upgrade it > to the latest version with the various security > fixes, get the sound working, and the latest > version of KDE. > > I'd like to do this while minimizing bandwidth. > I have the v4.3 April 2000 CD's. There's nothing > significant on the machine that I want to save > (except the high scores from KDE's Shisen-Sho > game). You can try the "Upgrade" option in the 4.3 installer. Since you're still within the 4.x branch, there aren't a lot of significant changes or headaches. > I'm thinking I should completely reinstall the > machine with 4.3, then upgrade from there. That's an option, too. Just back up anything you want to keep. (Configuration, Shisen-Sho high scores, etc (my fiancee's current best is 1:03 with the default settings ;-) If it were me, I'd just hook my 4.1 system to the 'net and cvsup to the latest STABLE sources. cvsup doesn't typically use a lot of bandwidth, and there shouldn't be a ton of diffs for you. I'd wager that whether you upgrade to 4.3 first or not, there wouldn't be much difference in the amount of time or network resources the cvsup would require. After that, it is necessary to rebuild your userland sources (i.e., make buildworld), recompile your kernel, and then install the kernel and user sources. You will then have the latest fixes and new features in the 4.x-STABLE chain. The whole process might take a few hours, for most of which you could be drinking coffee watching source compile :-) > Any suggestions? > > BTW, I'm getting a > "d:\floppies\kern.flp - File is too big" error > when trying to make the boot floppies from the > 4.3 CD's. The floppy is freshly formatted > without system files and shows 1,457,664 bytes > available on disk. Is this a known bug, or am > I missing something. Creating the boot floppies > is NOT working as documented. Well, you're not creating the boot floppies as documented :-) Don't format them first--the boot floppies are images that need to be written, track for track, onto the disk. Read the installation instructions, and (assuming you are doing this from a DOS-based machine), use the rawrite or fdimage tools to write out disks based on kern.flp and mfsroot.flp. Thou shalt not drag and drop thy vendor's boot floppies. ;-) > Maybe I've got a bad CD? Something else? I'm kind > of leery of installing from those CD's until I > figure out what's wrong with the > simple procedure of creating boot floppies. If you're installing from CD, is there a reason why you can't boot from the CD and install it that way? If your BIOS will boot from CD-ROM, you shouldn't need the floppies at all. > > Thanks, Cla. > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > -- Ryan Thompson <ryan@sasknow.com> Network Administrator, Accounts SaskNow Technologies - http://www.sasknow.com #106-380 3120 8th St E - Saskatoon, SK - S7H 0W2 Tel: 306-664-3600 Fax: 306-664-1161 Saskatoon Toll-Free: 877-727-5669 (877-SASKNOW) North America To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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