After everything is installed and setup properly, it’s important to keep an eye on updating the system. The emphasis is not so much slavishly chasing the cutting edge of BSD technology. Instead, Ed focuses on security updates and optimization in the latest part of his FreeBSD series.
Desktop FreeBSD Part 8: Updating the Core System
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
The nerd in me really wants to try to use FreeBSD as a desktop operating system for a month, and write about my experiences. I was planning to do this with FreeBSD 5.3, but for some reason, the ATA code doesn’t seem to work well on my system, and I had to run FreeBSD 5.3 with UDMA access to my hard disks turned off (otherwise chaos quickly ensued).
I was really excited because I know nVidia has drivers for FreeBSD, and I was pretty certain that my camera would work too, so I didn’t see any show stoppers before I ran into the ATA problem.
Once FreeBSD 5.4 ships, I am going to try again, in order to see if it will indeed work better with my ATA controller (standard UDMA 133 controller – Asus A7V mobo). The other desktop BSD experiment I am considering would be DragonFly BSD, but that would be less fun as I wouldn’t be able to use the nVidia drivers, and thus I’d lose TwinView.
Anyhoo, here is hoping that these problems go away soon!
The first articles that Ed Hurst wrote about FreeBSD received a very harsh reception at bsdforums.org. But Ed didn’t let that discourage him and this series of articles has in time grown into an excellent guide for newbies who want to try FreeBSD. Shame on all of you FreeBSD elitists at bsdforums.org!
Before you go calling bsdforums mebers as elitists, would you care to link to those threads? I remember them pretty well, and they weren’t flames, but points raised that’s validity can be agreed or disagreed with. Otherwise congrats do Ed for keeping up with FreeBSD an writing these excellent guides.
My issue with calling bsdforum members as elitists is that I came from a newbie friendly linux distro – Mandrake – to FreeBSD, having posted to pclinuxonline and mandrakeusers and being accustomed to the friendly atmosphere there. To my surprise, bsdforums was at least that friendly. They expcect you to read the documentation of course, but they are very very helpful and tolerant, and even if you made zero efforts to try to learn before you post, you are pointed to the Handbook in a polite manner rather than rtfm. I always admired and still admire the extreme patience they show towards n00bs – so please, don’t generalize based on one incident that wasn’t as clear cut as you would like us to believe.
Yes, you’re right and I apologize if I gave the impression that the people who write to the FreeBSD section at bsdforums.org are elitists. In fact many people there, especially one very knowleadgable guy called phoenix, has numerous times offered me invaluable help in my FreeBSD related problems. But the reception that Ed’s first article received there was way too harsh. The thread I’m referring to is here:
http://www.bsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15044
BTW, I hate the habit of some people here at osnews.com to address their replys to a nickname or ip address. It makes the impression that they are challenging a person instead of responding to an argument. 😛
Yes, shame on all BSD elitists as they’ve made my newbie period really hard. However, I value honesty more than hype. SO no matter the ignorance, the BSD user help has been 10000x the value of Linux user help
For those of us who are very new to FreeBSD, there are more Ed’s fine articles available here:
http://ed.asisaid.com/#fbsd
Yeah, I agree about the harshness – I didn’t like it myself … As to
BTW, I hate the habit of some people here at osnews.com to address their replys to a nickname or ip address.
I never thought about this … it’s probably that some of us are used to the reply to this post facility which is absent here
Invoke mergemaster….
If you update only your base (system sources) a mergemaster isn’t necesary,it’s only mandatory when upgrading between successive versions eg: 4.10–>5.3
Please feel free to correct me if i’m wrong.
Instead of specifying tag=RELENG_5 you could allso write tag=RELENG_5_3 into your cvsup.base file.What’s the difference one might say.Well it’s fairly simple one you know.With RELENG_5 you allways get the latest as release tagged 5.x version (mergemaster needed),whereas RELENG_5_x “only” gets you on the current patchlevel (no mergemaster needed).
TIP:For the ones who would like to install a wireles lan adapter card.
Every WIFI card has a FCC number with which you can check the driver info on http://www.e-tech.nu.
Now with this newly acquired info you can download the windows drivers for the sys and info files with which we compile our own FreeBSD drivers later on.You have to paste the sys and info file to /tmp/,later on the ndiscvt tool (standard present from FreeBSD 5.3 > ,needs them to for the headerfiled needed at compile time.
code:
#for this example i take NetAm.inf,your file names may #differ
/usr/src/sys/modules/if_ndis
ndiscvt -i /tmp/NetAm722.inf
-s /tmp/Am772.sys
-o ndis_driver_data.h
make
make install
Now you can test the fresh compiled module if_ndis.ko
If you PC doesn’t freeze you have won, otherwise reboot and compile a module from an other sys file, it’s that simple.
the rest should be pretty straight forward.
Oh i nearly forgot to mention firmware.Well you can with:
ndiscvt -f firmware.xyz convert the file into the FreeBSD object format.Just copy this newly generated file into
/compat/ndis,FreeBSD will load it when the drivers is initiated.If the ndis driver is necesary during boot (eg:boot from PXE without harddisk),its feasonable (analog to /boot/loader.conf)to load it with the PXE bootloader altogether.
Nice weekend all 🙂
Please feel free to correct me if i’m wrong.
Instead of specifying tag=RELENG_5 you could allso write tag=RELENG_5_3 into your cvsup.base file.What’s the difference one might say.Well it’s fairly simple one you know.With RELENG_5 you allways get the latest as release tagged 5.x version (mergemaster needed),whereas RELENG_5_x “only” gets you on the current patchlevel (no mergemaster needed).
RELENG_5 gives you the head of the 5-STABLE branch, not the latest release from it. And you should ALWAYS run mergemaster after an upgrade, also when tracking RELENG_5_x.
1. There was a major ATA code-upgrade about 1-2 weeks ago. If you know how to upgrade the source to recompile the kernel, you dont have to wait for 5.4 (read about it on “freebsd-current” mailing list at freebsd.org)
2. But nvidia driver (for me) was a great diappointment.I tried the latest one after 4.10 released. There was a recent (mentioned in errata) bug in 4.10 which made the nvidia driver crash always. Using the patches included in the driver-pack and compiling a new kernel didnt solve the problem. Recently with 4.11 (which contains the fix for 4.10 problems i hope) i had the very same problem. Maybe i am too lame for installing a fbsd system which can run opengl progs. If thats so problematic, what about ATI driver? (which is said to be terrible comparing to nvidia)
So let’s say i just have installed FreeBSD 5.3 and i would like to apply patches only and no upgrade to a higher release.What would i enter in cvsup.base? RELENG_5 or RELENG_5_3 ? Are there cases were you don’t have to run mergemaster?
RELENG_5_3 would pull down only the security updates/errata fixes for 5.3_RELEASE. No need to run mergemaster in that case. When you do uname -a after update, you’ll see pX (where X is the patchlevel) appended to the name of your RELEASE, like 5.3-RELEASE-p5 or something like that.
RELENG_5 will pull down latest sources from the STABLE development branch. I always run mergemaster (I run stable on my home computer) after I rebuild world/kernel, but I’m not sure if it is really necessary. It is a good practice since there might be minor changes to several files in /etc/, though not for the ones I edited to my purposes (/etc/hosts, pf.conf, rc.conf, etc.) – and not changes that would interfere in a major way in the operation of your system. If it does, it will be noted in /usr/src/UPDATING. uname will be: FreeBSD mcsaba.sh.nek.klte.hu 5.3-STABLE FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE #17: Fri Feb 11 04:51:51 … blah (#17 is the times you compiled the kernel using the same config file).
I recommend RELENG_5 for home/desktop use, for despite being a development branch, it is very stable – as stable as any linux distro. Sometimes RELENG_5 is also used in production, for it has fixes for a number of issues that still plagued the 5.3-RELEASE. Also, the ULE scheduler is back on line again, so if you want kickass desktop performance (comparable to 2.6.x linux) you’ll need to update to STABLE. READ the handbook if you want to learn how to enable it, and /usr/src/sys/conf/NOTES and /user/src/sys/i386/conf/NOTES.
what’s up with e-tech.nu? A plug for a network company that almost no one in the US would ever use?
Are there cases were you don’t have to run mergemaster?
No, always run it. Unless you can go through the sources and see that no /etc/* files(or any other conf files and scripts) have not changed then you need to run it.