[nflug] FreeBSD 8

[Ken Smith]

On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 21:58 -0400, Robert Wolfe wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> Well, at this point, I am installin the Dec 07 release of FreeBSD 8.0 while
> downloading the current release of 8.0.  I was wondering, once the Dec 07
> release is installed, can I upgrade directly from the CDs that I download
> tonight?  Also, when is the expected release date of FreeBSD 8?
> 

First the standard disclaimer - at this point you shouldn't be calling
anything related to FreeBSD 8 a "release".  It's a "snapshot" (meaning
short of being able to successfully install it all bets are off - you're
working with what happened to be in the source repository at the point I
built the snapshots and often times various works are very much still in
progress... :-).  You seemed to "get that" from the last sentence but it
might be worth mentioning for the rest of the crowd.  Life on HEAD (the
"bleeding edge" of the source tree) isn't usually *too* horrible but
unless you're a developer or just really interested in dealing with the
guts of stuff you're better off with one of the stable branches.
They're usually not quite this bad but in general unless you pay close
attention to what's going on in the freebsd-current at freebsd.org mailing
list it's best to think of the snapshots as a "Holy cr*p.  It compiled!
And the machine that compiled it was able to complete a build!  And
look, it's the beginning of the month!  Do the snapshot."  :-)

There is an "upgrade" option in the sysinstall menus but frankly even I
never use it.  FreeBSD updates are a fair bit different than what you're
used to with most other OSs.  It winds up taking a while "wall clock
time" but the best way to update is frankly updating the source code,
building it, and installing it.  If you've never done it before it can
be a bit daunting but once you've been through it a few times it gets a
LOT easier.  And despite how long it seems to take (anywhere from 15
minutes to an hour on modern systems to build the system from source
depending on processor speed, memory, disk speed, etc...) unless the
machine is being *severely* beaten on by other stuff you can actually do
the whole procedure while the machine is up and running - the only
downtime on many of our machines when I'm updating them is the reboot
itself.  That's why I said "wall clock time" above.  During the vast
majority of the time you're engaged in doing the update the machine is
still fully functional and going about its business as if nothing was
going on (perhaps a bit slower because it's compiling stuff...).

Start here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/synching.html

which describes updating the source code (use csup which now comes with
the baseline system, don't install cvsup) and the following pages of the
Handbook describe how to rebuild and install from that.  I have machines
that started off with FreeBSD 4.8 that have never had a CD stuck into
them since that initial install though a few of the past major version
hops required a bit more care than "normal" (the hop from 4.X to 5.X was
particularly nasty).

The other advantage of FreeBSD's update procedure is the whole thing can
be done remotely (having serial access to what the machine considers its
console is a plus but not necessary unless something goes wrong, which
of course it will if you don't have some sort of access to what the
machine considers its console... :-/).  I help administer (including
full OS updates) machines that are somewhere in California - frankly I
don't know exactly where and even if I did they wouldn't let me into the
machine room to touch them... :-)

And the current thoughts on timeframe for various releases including 8.0
is here:

http://www.freebsd.org/releng/index.html

which sez June 2009-ish for 8.0.

-- 
                                                Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |