Examine the file /etc/make.conf. This contains some default defines for Everything is, by default, commented out. Uncomment those entries that look useful. For a typical user (not a developer), you'll probably want to uncomment the CFLAGS and NOPROFILE definitions. If your machine has a floating point unit (386DX, 486DX, Pentium and up class machines) then you can also uncomment the HAVE_FPU line. The 2>&1 construct is specific to the /bin/sh shell. Under /bin/csh you could use make world |& tee /var/tmp/mw.out Other shells have their own constructs to do the same thing. Then go and make yourself several cups of tea. Remaking the world is a long process. One of our servers, a 200Mhz P6 with fairly run-of-the-mill SCSI disks, 64MB RAM and 256MB swap it takes a shade under two hours to complete. One of the 32MB (128MB swap), P133 machines takes about 5 hours. The only caveat I am aware of is that (at least the last few times I tried it with 2.1.5), Which means, whenever I have to install a new machine, I generally download the This may have changed up to 2.1.7. I unfortunately do not have the spare machines to test it. Although, in theory, nothing's going to touch this directory automatically, it's always better to be sure. So copy your existing /etc directory somewhere safe. Something like cp -rp /etc /etc.old will do the trick (-r does a recursive copy, -p preserves times, ownerships on files and suchlike). /var/tmp/root now contains all the files that should be placed in appropriate locations below /. You now have to go through each of these files, determining how they differ with your existing files. This is not a task that can be automated (at the moment). Note that some of the files that will have been installed in /var/tmp/root have a leading '.'. Make sure you use The simplest way to do this is to use the For example, diff -c /etc/shells /var/tmp/root/etc/shells will show you the differences between your /etc/shells file and the new /etc/shells file. Use these to decide whether to merge in changes that you've made or whether to copy over your old file. When it comes to /var/tmp/root/dev, you should just copy over the You will use those scripts a little later to update your /dev directory. Here is a (probably incomplete) list of files that you will probably want to merge or copy by hand. namedb/* ppp/* That is not an exhaustive list, and changes to FreeBSd in the future may necessitate moving files from the Those filenames shown in I note from the mailing lists that /etc/sysconfig is being renamed to /etc/rc.conf, and that the contents of the file may be altering. I can not currently build a system to include these changes in this document. For safety's sake, this is a multistep process. You should already have copied in the /dev. Do the following, ls -la /dev > /var/tmp/dev1.out ls -la /var/tmp/root/dev > /var/tmp/dev2.out This gives you a reference for when things go wrong… Run a quick diff over these two files to see if anything's missing. If you use slices in your disk partitioning (which may not be necessary on a 'dangerously dedicated' disk) then these slices have almost certainly not been made. Note down the devices that exist in Now do, cd /dev sh MAKEDEV all This will generate all the standard devices. You must now do whatever's necessary to recreate devices that you noticed as missing in the previous step. For my setup, that involved doing sh MAKEDEV sd0s1a sh MAKEDEV sd1s1a to create the slice entries on my two disks. Your circumstances may vary. If at all in doubt, make sure you have a handy boot and fixit floppy, and a very recent backup of your system. You should now have successfully upgraded your FreeBSD system. Congratulations. It's likely that over the next few days you'll notice little oddities that don't work as expected, or small upgrades you've forgotten to do. Something I missed for several days was that /etc/magic was missing. It was only when I went to run /usr/src/usr.bin/file sorted that one out.