upgrade from 4.2 to 6.2

Polytropon freebsd at edvax.de
Fri Feb 26 17:18:35 UTC 2016


On Fri, 26 Feb 2016 21:40:24 +0530, sathiyaraj v wrote:
> I am doing it for the first time.

This is why a verified backup is mandatory. :-)



> That's why I am looking for some tutor. I
> just tried to add new files  in the existing 4.2. But I ran into
> compilation issues. To fix that I am searching file by file. That consumes
> lot of my time.

Manually messing with the source is not a good idea, especially
when you want to improve system security.



> That's where I thought of direct upgrade from 4.2 to 6.2.

The easiest way to do this is to actually re-install the whole OS
(and then the applications you need). Doing this via source is
possible, but often more complicated than it needs to be. You
will have to manually download the source distributions, as FreeBSD
4 and 6 still use CVS for source checkout (which isn't supported
anymore and therefore won't work). Installing the currently required
tool for source checkout, which is SVN, isn't really possible because
FreeBSD 4 and 6 are lacking the ports toolchain which is required,
and binary packages probably won't exist for that old version (in
the archive I mentioned in a previous message).



> My understanding is that to upgrade from 4.2 to 6.2 ,we need to take backup
> and install new SRC directly.

No, you install the OS in the "normal" (binary) manner. To install
from source, you need a system that's able to process the sources,
which in your case would mean you'd first have to get the sources
of 5.0, compile and install, upgrade to lastest 5.x version, compile
and install, get sources of 6.0, compile and install, upgrade sources
to 6.2, compile and install - which is much more work than actually
using the precompiled 6.2 installation image and install "from scratch",
and after that, restore configuration and user data from backup.



> Is that a way or any other easiest way to
> achieve that?

As I said, it's possible, but much more work that it needs to be.
There's nothing wrong with installing "from scratch". From the
installation media, you can also install precompiled packages of
software you need. And everything else can be installed from the
ftp-archive location with $PACKAGESITE set for pkg_add.

Is there any reason for you not to install a _current_ FreeBSD
version, such as FreeBSD 10.2 for PPC? It will be much easier
for you to get the additional software you need: You can install
it binarily (via "pkg add") or from source with the ports collection
(which now has totally different "inner workings"). And you're
using an OS that is supported.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list