Hey Gang
The title may not be too clear, so I'll repackage the question
can freeBSD upgrade in a rolling fashion?
The reason is simple, I have a development server, and it seems that it's kinda "EOL", it's Debian Squeeze, and Wheezy if huffin-puffin around...
Procedures are all over the place and look promissing. However, since I do want to start using freeBSD on a more regular base, maybe this is a nice "fork-in-the-road" to hop over to that hehe
So, upgrade, I just got me the 10.0, supported until january 31th 2015, some go further than that...
Say, I install the 10.0, and a newer release rolls along, do I back-up and reinstall or just upgrade. Granted, reinstall is cleaner, but...takes time, upgrade is faster but potentially dangerous as things could end up sour and I end up doing a resintall anyway...
Suggestions?
Thanks
Thor

You can simply keep upgrading to the latest release

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/...bsdupdate.html

Or if you want to track STABLE or CURRENT development branches

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...nt-stable.html

Don't mistake any of this for "rolling releases" however. *BSD projects aim to put out stable, usable operating systems, not hobby projects.

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Hi!
Thanks for the info, and...

Well, there you have the reason for freeBSD...

Thor

No problem. I run 9.3-RELEASE rather than 10.0-RELEASE - no broken VT switching with radeon/drm - but of course I have older hardware. Never understood the need to be always running the latest of everything...

cynwulf,

I run FreeBSD 10.0 in Virtualbox on Slackware64-current and OpenBSD 5.5 on this older dual core box. I love how the BSDs breathe life into potentially obsolete hardware.

:d

...

I found that I couldn't boot 10.0 from virtualbox when I was messing around a few months back - it kept freezing up on boot. No problems with 9.3 - probably a virtualbox problem - maybe it was updated recently...

I have a tripe boot, OpenBSD 5.5, FreeBSD 9.3 (both amd64) and Windows XP box. Each one is on it's own hard disk and accessed via gag boot manager.

It has an old radeon HD 3xxx series GPU, 2GB of RAM and an Athlon64 X2 CPU. These were new (budget/discount) parts when I put the machine together - one of the few occasions where I bought new parts. Nothing spectacular, but it works and it will be used until it doesn't work.

I don't believe in wasting money on computers. In fact I used to have a second box, but got rid of that one recently to save space. That one was built almost entirely from salvaged bits. I inherited 3 motherboards which were supposed to be faulty, turned out to be just the cheap and nasty RAM, binned that and installed some other RAM I found in some other dead PCs along with their PSUs and hard disks. Got one good system running from that, installed an old Nvidia 7xxx AGP GPU and bought a Pentium 4 off ebay for a few pounds to replace the celeron. It was a good system, I actually regret binning it now, but had little choice at the time.

The windows XP is for my better half. it gets used very seldom these days, but can't get rid of it...

Umm, 686, 512Mb, 40Gb, boot of CD only, no boot from USB...hehe, obsolete enough? The server, that's not so much a problem (T105 by Dell) but the "lifeforce" freeBSD has...owwwwww.....
@ cynwulf - ouch, quit ethe setup, each OS on its own drive, I could'nt get that going so I took it the other way: one OS per box, of course, that makes me end up with six separate boxes and three experimantals...but hey... :P

All depends on what you want to do with it? When you say "686", do you mean in terms of architecture or one of the old cyrix things?

I only ever boot from cds, just keep a few cdrws handy, blank them and burn the iso using cdrecord, job done.
It's very easy - it's trying to install several operating systems on the same disk which can be more complex. For those with a laptop, there's not much choice if they want to boot more than one OS.

Where people typically fall down in the multi disk scenario is when they hose their system during install typically by getting their disks mixed up. I'm lucky to have not done this so far, but never say never...

I think OpenBSD's installer shows you the disk's serial/model number (not much use as two of my three disks have the same number - and all three are exactly the same size) whereas FreeBSD's and NetBSD's does not, just the device node names. I usually switch to a VT and have a look at fdisk output for the devices, that will usually give me an idea of which disk is which, by viewing the partition info.

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It says VIA C3 at bootup, smoothly runs a CentOS 5.x; but since I want stuff that's not in the repo (softsynth with MIDI control over USB, basically I want to turn that machine in a synthesizer controlled via a MIDI keyboard...) a make-over is the option, just is sentimentaly "hard" to say byebye to the ol'd gal (the OS that is)...call me an old fool hehe
And yes, multi-disks is the way to go. I installed OS/2 next to win 3.11 (yep, I'm THAT old hehe) and it took me months to get that right, seen in hindsight, I was lucky not to have poofed my main system...since I was jobhunting at the time, the box had my ONLY valid resume...

Thor

I dual boot Slackware64-current and OpenBSD 5.5 on this box. The trick is to install Slackware first and let the install DVD set-up a partition for OpenBSD (I use the Slackware install DVD to set the partition as type A6 for OpenBSD). It is more difficult to set the partitions using your OpenBSD CD (I've never tried, but, was warned against trying by an experienced user). Lilo handles Slackware and OpenBSD nicely.
I like how you're using GAG. I've never used that.

I tend to ignore such warnings. You're referring to fdisk and disklabel which are also used to set up partitions in OpenBSD at the point of install

disklabel's interactive mode looks daunting, but is not as complex as it may at first seem.

http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#disklabel

You can use the FreeBSD-current channel but it's not advised as most ports can break at times. Stick to the release channels mostly for stability.

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