getting ports updated on an older FreeBSD (5.1)

[Thomas Mueller]

I don't really know what to quote here, but another consideration is that a new FreeBSD will want or need more RAM and hard-disk space than was prevalent at the time of FreeBSD 5.1.

That means a new computer.  There are adapters, IDE <-> SATA and USB -> IDE, to transfer data from old IDE hard drives to a newer computer that has SATA and no IDE on motherboard.  Also possibly NFS.

Other changes are MBR -> GPT and old static device nodes with MAKEDEV (such as NetBSD and OpenBSD still have) to devfs.

I was thinking about the possibility of building/upgrading the base FreeBSD from source by steps, such as 5.1 -> final 6-stable -> final 8-stable -> 10.1 or possibly FreeBSD-current.

Or maybe shorter steps?  Might be possible, but would likely be easier to download 10.1 or a snapshot of 10.1-STABLE or 11-current and install that.  Use bsdinstall?

In any case the ports would need to be rebuilt on new system.

Tom