FreeBSD 5.3 is available

ISO's for 5.3-RELEASE are on most of the FTP mirrors if you go looking. This is the start of the -STABLE branch moving to 5.x, and my last was 4.9 about six months ago, so my hopes are high.

I just upgraded 6 boxes from FreeBSD 5.2.1 to FreeBSD 5.3 with only on hitch. When I ran the make buildwork I ran it with a -j22 variable, but after installing the world and reboot, some of the PAM libararies were slightly buggered, so I simply redid the buildworld and install without the -j22 variable and everything was fine after that.

nice, -j22? that's an awful lot

my only issue thus far is with nvidia-driver and xorg, they don't seem to agree on libGL.so. I don't care about any OpenGL performance enhancements, but it seems to be the only way to get support for the dual heads on my ti4200. I never ran a 5.x before. DevFS is kind of nice.

Can anyone be kind and explain me exactly how can I upgrade
from FreeBSD 5.2.1 to FreeBSD 5.3.

I made the 3 disks and boot with them, but I don't know what
option to chose, and what is next.

Don't you want to install windows instead?

What is Your PROBLEM????????? """M.Hirsch""""

I was a linux user for ten years, now for the last two month
I use freebsd, and now I want to upgrade to 5.3.
When I was making an upgrade at linux, I had the option upgrade
and the install program was auto find the actual linux.

It is very hard to answer a very simple question?
If you CAN'T, please don't.

After booting the first CD, you get to the sysinstall menu. I have no idea which CDs you are using, but mine shows these options:
- Usage
- Standard
- Express
- Custom
- Configure
- Doc
- Keymap
- Options
- Fixit
- Upgrade
- Load Config
- Index

My problem? Lol... come down, man! I was making a sarcastic remark, not attacking you personally or something.

M.

Sorry, I had a very bad day.
I find some info that the upgrade option is not recommend, it's recommend to backup
your data and install a fresh 5.3 and then restore your backup data.
I'm asking: if I use the sysinstall to upgrade the system, it will be safe?

Most FreeBSD users I know of upgrade from source, rather than from binaries. However, since you want to upgrade from binaries, this is how to do it:

DISCLAIMER: You've backed up your important data already, right?

1. Boot from the CD ROM 1.
2. In the sysinstall menu you see here:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.IS...sysinstall.html
note that one of the options in this screen says "Upgrade an existing system"

[edit]Oops, I see Manuel has already pointed that screen up above.[/edit]

Ok, no prob.

I'd always make a fresh install if it is feasible (i.e. not too much non-standard customization of the old installation). There is two unique problems you mentioned and one I added:
1. Always backup your data. Regularly and additionally before making big changes to your OS like an upgrade
2. The binary upgrade via the sysinstall program will not overwrite your configuration files (or if it does, it should at least backup the originals - not sure).
But the problem is that the format will have changed for some programs, so they won't start with your old configuration file.
There is no automatic conversion. You have to find out which ones this concernes and update the config files manually.
You have to decide which one fits your situation best.
3. The upgrade process will leave old config files in old locations if they have been moved to new locations. /etc/namedb moved to /usr/local/etc/namedb some weeks ago eg.
You will have duplicates and I know for sure that it would happen to me that I edit the old file and wonder why the settings are never applied.
Again, depending on how many of them you expect to have, you can manually remove them, or...

... do a fresh install.

Usually I don't even care to find out if an upgrade would be faster, I directly make a fresh installation. An upgrade is faster, but if you run into problems, it can turn out to take hours and days to clean everything up.

hth,
M.

[edit]
Grammar + Clarified the "overwrite config files" part. I have no idea if sysinstall backups them or not. But this should be the difference between choosing "Upgrade" over "Install" IMHO. Untested

I made a binary upgrade via sysinstall and almost everything went great.
The only problem that I (know) had is with php, I needed to install it again.

I decided to make a fresh install, because it's more clean and stable.

Thanks folks for all your help.

Later on, when you feel ready to do this, search this forum for how to upgrade from source using cvsup and mergemaster. I have some boxes upgraded all the way from FreeBSD 4.2 .

Just cvsupped my laptop to the latest 5.3-STABLE... nice!

Since upgrading from 5.2.1, I have noticed a marked improvement in performance for FreeBSD as a desktop. With only 128 MB RAM, this laptop does fine running KDE 3.3, Firefox, Thunderbird and various other progs on top of Apache, Samba, PostgreSQL, and CUPS. (Although I often use WindowMaker anyway for a nice terse desktop)

I have noticed almost zero hardware problems on several systems, except that Firewire on the SiS 651 motherboards seems to freeze it up on boot. (I am developing a commercial touch-screen application, using those cheap Biostar iDeq cubes). When I disable Firewire in the BIOS, 5.3 boots fine.

I'm not ready to migrate my servers to it, but hopefully in another couple of months we will be heading that way (nice performance boosts for PostgreSQL and MySQL).

I'm having problems burning the 5.3-RELEASE-i386-disc2.iso
I had no problem burning the first disk.
I try to download the second disk from different location and
the same result. Anyway, what's in the second disk?