Re: newby needing help

On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 09:39:50PM +0000, neal wrote:
Roland Smith wrote:
On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 09:11:01PM +0000, neal wrote:
I've checked out all the main functions I want from FreeBSD and had them
all working (hehe, but since broke some) so I'm happy it will do the
things I want so far.

First question, what is recommended regarding doing updates. Is it best
to just do all of them?
It depends. If the update of the base system concerns something that you
use, I would definitely install it.

That's the problem though, same with linux, there are obvious things that I
would update but there are likely items that I would never have a clue if I
needed them or not. As I'm going to do a completely fresh install on a
clean system I might just try doing all upgrades right from the start and
see how it goes from there.

There are different branches that you can follow. You could go for
6.2-RELEASE with (security patches). You won't have to update this
often. Or if you need drivers or features that are not in RELEASE yet,
you can follow 6-STABLE. 7-CURRENT is for those feeling adventurous.

I'd recommend starting with 6.2-RELEASE with patches.

The best way to keep the base system up-to-date is using csup (which is
still referenced in the Handbook in §20.3 as cvsup).
For updating the ports tree I can recommend portsnap. For updating the
ports themselves I use portmaster.
I have always had problems doing this e.g. with Mandrake and other Linuxs
and so am reluctant, but if it is usual I'll give it a try.
The upgrade tools on FreeBSD work quite well. But if you're rebuilding
your own ports it can take quite some time depending on your machine.

I've been using the Package Manager so far but will look into using a
command prompt at some later time.

I've never used "Package Manager". I didn't even know FreeBSD had one. :-)

I have a drive hda, it has a swap an unused space and four partitions one
of which is my home partition hda7. How do I refer to this home partition
using ad0???
notation
If you do 'ls ad0*' you'll see what is available. Remember that what DOS
and Linux calls partitions are called slices in FreeBSD. Partitions in
FreeBSD are subdivisions of a slice. E.g. ad0s1a is partition a of slice
1 of ad0. Customarily, slice b is used for swap, and slice c is
unused. You can see this with the 'bsdlabel' command.

OK, I've done that.

this is the result for the drive currently being used by linux.
-------------------------
[pineal@localhost /usr/home/pineal]$ ls /dev/ad0*
/dev/ad0 /dev/ad0s2 /dev/ad0s6 /dev/ad0s8
/dev/ad0s1 /dev/ad0s5 /dev/ad0s7 /dev/ad0s9
-------------------------

The number of apparent slices (those with a ad0s[n] designation) seen by
BSD is one more than the number of linux partitions I actually have. No I
haven't miss-counted.

I have 1 swapfile partition and five partitions hda5-9 used by linux.

Try mounting slices 5-9 with mount_ext2fs (as root).

btw I tried to run the bsdlabel command but it returns "no valid label
found" for both ad0 and ad1.

My bad. That only works with BSD partitions.

Maybe I didn't make myself clear here. I have an existing in-use Linux
system. I want to be able to access the /home partition as it contains all
my personal data that I will need to move over to FreeBSD when I do the new
install.

I would still recommend moving the data to a UFS2 filesystem.

You might find §16.3 of the Handbook enlightening.

did you mean from Ch 16 "3. Why will chmod not change the permissions on
symlinks?"

I mean chapter 16, section 3; "Adding Disks" (on my 6-STABLE system). The
HTML version lives at
file:///usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks-adding.html

Roland
--
R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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