Painful, but worth it

FreeBSD version 6.0 came out yesterday. I figured it was as good a time as any to upgrade, as it would reveal for us once & for all if the FreeBSD upgrade was better than the Ubuntu one.

Well. . .

Again, I was let down a bit by the documentation - it was a chore to find out exactly how to do the upgrade thing. But with a few false starts, we got through it: Downloading the 6.0 source, compiling it, and booting in afterwards.

Some of the false starts:

• Using the current sysinstall to reinstall the base system, thereby re-installing the current 5.4 base system.
• gf rebooting into single-user mode halfway thru & finding that /usr/src was empty. I took a look, found that ALL of /usr was empty, and checked mounted filesystems. Sure enough, there were none but root :o) So we mounted everything, and continued just fine
• gf finding her account had vanished (probably over-wrote a file she shouldn't have), so we recreated her account thru the wonderful sysinstall, and all her files were still there - her /home was fine, it had obviously just lost /etc/password

So all in all, a successful upgrade. Just as slow as the Ubuntu one, but more successful, and mostly just due to compiling, not masses of pointless downloading.

So I think we're sticking with FreeBSD for now - it's easier maintenence.