living with freebsd

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

On May 5, 2008, at 12:12 AM, prad wrote:

> i'd like to know how people live with freebsd.

My FreeBSD systems are light weight servers only, so what I do is  
specific to my circumstances and tastes.

> do you use only ports or only packages or a mixture?

I only use ports, but I suppose that if I had some really large things  
to install like OOo, I would consider using packages.

> do you upgrade from version to version using freebsd tools or do it
> manually?

I use csup and will rebuild world and the kernel as needed.  I've got  
a fairly stripped down kernel to improve boot times.  But again, I  
kind of find it "cool" to compile the whole OS.  It may be irrational  
and non-optimal.  That's why I said some of this is a matter of taste  
as well as circumstances.

My choice of when to upgrade the OS really depends on what I need.  I  
don't like to be too far behind.  I recently moved one system for 7.0  
RELEASE to 7 STABLE because of a specific fix that affected one of my  
systems.

> do you have a different approach regarding the above depending on
> whether it is for a server or a desktop?

I suspect that for a desktop, I would be more tempted to keep closer  
to GENERIC and use packages.  But I only have FreeBSD servers on which  
I don't even run an X11 server.

Cheers,

-j


-- 
Jeffrey Goldberg                        http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/