Upgrading FreeBSD Questions

[David Syphers]

On Monday 29 October 2007, Jason Slack wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I am new to FreeBSD, or want to be.
>
> I have an HP Media center PC that has the Viiv 920-D processor with 4GB of
> RAM. I hate Windows, but had to sell my MacBook so my Fiance and I could
> get into a new apartment together.
>
> I want to try version 7 as it has items of interest to me, but I am not one
> to continually wipe and reload my machine, can you upgrade from the test
> releases of 7 available now to the final release when ready? Or do you have
> to wipe?

With FreeBSD you can (by and large) upgrade from anything to anything. 
Certainly from 6.x or 7-beta to 7.0 release when that happens. (Upgrades to 
later 7.x releases will be painless as well.) You can do a binary upgrade, 
but most people on this list (-stable) will use source upgrade. See 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cutting-edge.html

It's really a fairly straightforward procedure, especially for someone with 
Unix background like yourself. When you upgrade, make sure you're using the 
source tag that you want (maybe RELENG_7_0 for you, which is the release 
branch - only critical fixes will go in this after the release happens).

Welcome to FreeBSD.

-David