remove distributions before installworld?

Giorgos Keramidas keramida at ceid.upatras.gr
Wed Oct 26 09:25:01 PDT 2005


On 2005-10-26 08:29, N Deepak <deep at symonds.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have installed FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE through CD-ROM.
>
> I used cvsup to sync my /usr/src directory to the latest STABLE tree.
>
> The problem is that I had installed some distributions that I no
> longer want to keep.  Also, I don't need lpr (this can be disabled
> through make.conf).  So, is there a way to remove these files, before
> I do 'make installworld'?
>
> I did not find any information on this in the handbook.

The ``FreeBSD From Scratch'' article has some nice tips about doing
"clean" installations, which you may find interesting:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/fbsd-from-scratch/

I don't use the scripts from that article, but you don't *HAVE* to use
them either.  The last time I did this, I used a second partition as a
'temporary boot area'.  I had the following original partitions:

	/
	/var
	/usr
	/home

Doing all my builds under /home/build as the 'build' user allows me to
boot from another disk, mount my original /home and install a new
snapshot with the following rough plan:

  * Mount a spare partition with at least 200 MB of space under /mnt/new

  * Install everything with "make DESTDIR=/mnt/new installworld"

  * Backup user passwords and a few minor /etc configuration options
    that I wanted to keep in /mnt/new/etc.tar.gz (i.e. user passwords,
    network setup files, etc).

  * Boot from the /mnt/new partition

  * Restore my /etc files

  * Wipe the old /, /var and /usr partitions with newfs

  * Remount the 'original' /, /var and /usr partitions under /mnt/root

  * Remount my original /home partition under /home (of the new disk)

  * Install everything again in their final location with:

	# cd /home/build/src
	# env MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX=/home/build/obj \
	      make DESTDIR=/mnt/root installworld

  * Run mergemaster to merge the new configuration files in /mnt/root
    with:

	# env MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX=/home/build/obj \
	      mergemaster -m /home/build/src/etc -D /mnt/root

  * Set up the boot loader to boot from the 'original' root

That's _not_ a detailed guide and I may have forgotten some of the
details, since I'm typing this away from my notebook at home.  It
may help you make your own plan though...

Regards,
Giorgos




More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list