Do I upgrade from 5.x to anything ?

[bsdfsse]

Hi Kevin,

I'm not sure the best way to intersperse my comments, but I deleted some 
of my original text to make this reply more concise.  Sorry if that 
makes this confusing, let me know if thats not the ideal way of emailing 
on a list:

>> computers doesn't work with it. Apparently FreeBSD 4.x doesn't like 
>> the  Asus motherboard's HD controller, and I constantly get disk
>> errors. HOWEVER, 5.x seems to work fine.
> 
> Seems strange, but not impossible.

I read that the dreaded "Signal 11" that I have been getting is 
something the developers are looking for reproducible examples of.  I 
will try to get some specifics on what I'm seeing.

> Same story.  But you don't need to install both "cvsup" and 
> "cvsup-without-gui".  Unless you've just
> gotta have eye candy, just install the nogui version and run it in an 
> xterm or something ... or an

Ok, cool.  I was installing them both for good measure.  I will only 
install the no-gui one now.


> Well, you don't need to cvsup *src* to get your ports up to date.  Your 
> ports tree would need to
> be updated, and then reinstall those ports.  Or use portupgrade ...

I need to read up on this.  I've been updating everything in one fell 
swoop, thanks for point this out.  I had it stuck in my head that the 
ports and kernel had to be upgraded together.

> And the ports tree is the same for everybody.  You always cvsup CURRENT 
> ports ....

INTERESTING.  I did not know that.  I thought when I installed FreeBSD 
4-RELEASE from CD, it had an old (7.3) version of Firefox.  After I did 
my update everything ritual, I was able to get the latest one (9.3).  I 
need to better understand that process.

> If you have 5.3BETA, run it, and cvsup/makebuildworld, etc next month.  
> Not a problem AFAIK.  Now,

One of the reasons I am running 4.x is because a friend of mine is going 
to run a website on FreeBSD, and we are learning about it together. 
Since he heard that he should run a website on 4.x, we decided to run it 
exclusively.  The only gotcha that has been encountered was *my* server 
not liking 4.x.  Should my friend be running 5.x?  He is going to be 
using Apache, PHP, and MySQL.  He doesn't want to get hacked, basically.

> An understanding of the RELEASE tags might help.  That information
> is in the Handbook, Chapter 19 IIRC, "The Cutting Edge".

I need to keep rereading that section until it sinks in better.

> You should be able to modify the stable-supfile to grab RELENG_5 instead
> of RELENG_4, this would get you to "BETA3", methinks (haven't checked

I will check that out.

> For ports, use /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile when you cvsup.
> You may also want to install portupgrade (/usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade),
> although there were problems with it a few days ago; I think they're fixed
> now, caveat emptor and YMMV and all that ....

I haven't used portupgrade yet, but I keep hearing about it.  I keep 
going in to /usr/ports/ and running "make install clean" on everything. 
  My friend said I might need to run "make config", but I didn't see 
where I would know if that needed to be done.

There was a problem with RUBY the other day, that honked up one my 
upgrade rituals I was performing.  There was a fix using "portindexdb", 
I think, which I also think was then removed from the /usr/port/ tree.

When I installed GNOME2 on my laptop, I used pkg_add to install the 
binary, so it wouldn't compile for 14 hours.  That worked great, and 
GNOME2 was running in about 10 minutes.

I will focus on the RELEASE/CURRENT/STABLE designations.  Maybe my 
friend will move to 5.x, but prolly not since his system is almost fully 
functional on 4.x.

Thanks!