I am new to FreeBSD and have installed version 5.3 on my Dell Inspiron 8600 Laptop. My question is how would I best accomplish these update tasks and what would the corresponding config file look like?

Update all source files

Update only my currently installed packages / ports

Update all english documentation



Thanks for any input.

cvsup Read up on cvsup. But basically you go to /usr/src/share/examples/cvsup copy standard-supfile AND ports-supfile to a good location, like /root/cvsup/ reason is if you edit the file examples in the default directories they will be gone the next time you update your src...

cvsup -g -L 2 /path/to/supfile

notes: for source, change the tag line to tag=RELENG_5_3 for 5.3 release with security updates. Leave tag=. in the ports supfile as you want it to be up-to-date...

If you change the hostname to a proper FreeBSD cvsup server you will have no problems running cvsup. Note: keep ports and src seperate and just update all. Using a refuse file or refusing certain ports will break the tree and cause issues.

Once you update your ports tree this is what I do:

cd /usr/ports
make fetchindex
portsdb -u
... either run ....pkg_version -v | grep -i "<" to see a list of what ports need updating and update them individually #OR#
portupgrade -arR
pkgdb -F

This should get you started. I have it all in a script so I just execute a command: sh update.sh and it does its thing...

If you need to update the src and recompile the kernel, then that is another story, but I gave you the method to update the src tree...