Upgrading FreeBSD Questions

[Dan Rue]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 04:25:18PM -0700, 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?
> 
> I apologize, but I am from a Solaris environment and then OS X.

Hi Jason, 

Welcome to FreeBSD!  

In the future, questions like this are best served on the
freebsd-questions mailing list, where there are many more people to help
with new-user issues like this. 

To your question - upgrades between freebsd minor releases are almost
always really easy (7.x->7.x).  Upgrades from 4.X to 6.x are a little
hairy.  6.x to 7.x aren't bad at all.  

See the freebsd handbook, and the (imo horribly misnamed) chapter "The
Cutting Edge" for information on how to perform the upgrades.
(http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cutting-edge.html).

Dan