newby needing help
Roland Smith
rsmith at xs4all.nl
Fri Sep 28 15:52:06 PDT 2007
On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 09:39:50PM +0000, neal wrote:
> Roland Smith wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 09:11:01PM +0000, neal wrote:
>>> I've checked out all the main functions I want from FreeBSD and had them
>>> all working (hehe, but since broke some) so I'm happy it will do the
>>> things I want so far.
>>>
>>> First question, what is recommended regarding doing updates. Is it best
>>> to just do all of them?
>> It depends. If the update of the base system concerns something that you
>> use, I would definitely install it.
>
> That's the problem though, same with linux, there are obvious things that I
> would update but there are likely items that I would never have a clue if I
> needed them or not. As I'm going to do a completely fresh install on a
> clean system I might just try doing all upgrades right from the start and
> see how it goes from there.
There are different branches that you can follow. You could go for
6.2-RELEASE with (security patches). You won't have to update this
often. Or if you need drivers or features that are not in RELEASE yet,
you can follow 6-STABLE. 7-CURRENT is for those feeling adventurous.
I'd recommend starting with 6.2-RELEASE with patches.
>> The best way to keep the base system up-to-date is using csup (which is
>> still referenced in the Handbook in §20.3 as cvsup).
>> For updating the ports tree I can recommend portsnap. For updating the
>> ports themselves I use portmaster.
>>> I have always had problems doing this e.g. with Mandrake and other Linuxs
>>> and so am reluctant, but if it is usual I'll give it a try.
>> The upgrade tools on FreeBSD work quite well. But if you're rebuilding
>> your own ports it can take quite some time depending on your machine.
>
> I've been using the Package Manager so far but will look into using a
> command prompt at some later time.
I've never used "Package Manager". I didn't even know FreeBSD had one. :-)
>>> I have a drive hda, it has a swap an unused space and four partitions one
>>> of which is my home partition hda7. How do I refer to this home partition
>>> using ad0???
>>> notation
>> If you do 'ls ad0*' you'll see what is available. Remember that what DOS
>> and Linux calls partitions are called slices in FreeBSD. Partitions in
>> FreeBSD are subdivisions of a slice. E.g. ad0s1a is partition a of slice
>> 1 of ad0. Customarily, slice b is used for swap, and slice c is
>> unused. You can see this with the 'bsdlabel' command.
>
> OK, I've done that.
>
> this is the result for the drive currently being used by linux.
> -------------------------
> [pineal at localhost /usr/home/pineal]$ ls /dev/ad0*
> /dev/ad0 /dev/ad0s2 /dev/ad0s6 /dev/ad0s8
> /dev/ad0s1 /dev/ad0s5 /dev/ad0s7 /dev/ad0s9
> -------------------------
>
> The number of apparent slices (those with a ad0s[n] designation) seen by
> BSD is one more than the number of linux partitions I actually have. No I
> haven't miss-counted.
>
> I have 1 swapfile partition and five partitions hda5-9 used by linux.
Try mounting slices 5-9 with mount_ext2fs (as root).
> btw I tried to run the bsdlabel command but it returns "no valid label
> found" for both ad0 and ad1.
My bad. That only works with BSD partitions.
> Maybe I didn't make myself clear here. I have an existing in-use Linux
> system. I want to be able to access the /home partition as it contains all
> my personal data that I will need to move over to FreeBSD when I do the new
> install.
I would still recommend moving the data to a UFS2 filesystem.
>> You might find §16.3 of the Handbook enlightening.
>
> did you mean from Ch 16 "3. Why will chmod not change the permissions on
> symlinks?"
I mean chapter 16, section 3; "Adding Disks" (on my 6-STABLE system). The
HTML version lives at
file:///usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks-adding.html
Roland
--
R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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