FreeBSD Release Engineering Team’s Bruce Mah announces that FreeBSD 4.7-RC2 (the second release candidate for FreeBSD 4.7) is now available for the i386 architecture from the usual FTP sites. Both an FTP site and a “disc 1” ISO image are available. FreeBSD 4.7-RC2 for the alpha architecture is being built and should be available shortly.
I look forward to getting 4.7. I have a question though; will upgrading from 4.7 to 5.0 be difficult? Or even to subsequent releases of 4.X?
usually with BSD once you’ve got it on your HD and got a net connection for it, you can use CVSUP to pull down the latest source and then recompile your kernel – thereby keeping you up to date.
4.x -> 4.x hasn’t been a problem in the past; not sure what the jump to 5.0 will be like.
i wouldn’t be surprised if it were possible to upgrade from 4.x to 5.0 via CVSup and a recompile…just like upgrading between 4.x versions…however i think in this case it’d be wiser to back up your important stuff (home directories and /etc your kernel config file) and then wipe eveything out and do a clean install…you’ll be happier i think…even BSD needs the cruft cleaned out every major release or so
-byte256
I don’t expect 5.0 to come out before 2003. The original plans were for November 2002, but I don’t see it being ready. They are way out of shcedule and they are one year off already.
What I read on their mailing lists, they will try to release it on Nov 2002. but with KSE and SMPng fully implemented, but as stable as possible.
“usually with BSD once you’ve got it on your HD and got a net connection for it, you can use CVSUP to pull down the latest source and then recompile your kernel – thereby keeping you up to date.”
Usually is the key word here
I tried doing that and ended up killing my system.
There was a fairly significatn update to sendmail, and I I really buggered up the mergemaster process…sendmail would not work at all afterwards. Ended up reinstalling the OS
After the sendmail update, you need to go into /etc/mail and run the make and make install on the Makefile since the configuration files are different. This rebuilds the sendmail.cf configuration file and installs it. Saddly, this wasn’t in time to save your installation.