FreeBSD The Power to Serve

FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE Installation Instructions

The FreeBSD Project

$FreeBSD: releng/8.4/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/installation/article.xml 249128 2013-04-05 04:08:03Z hrs $

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This article gives some brief instructions on installing FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE and upgrading the systems running earlier releases.


1 Installing FreeBSD

For instructions on installing FreeBSD, please see Chapter 2 of The FreeBSD Handbook. It provides a complete installation walk-through for users new to FreeBSD, and can be found online at: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install.html


2 Upgrading FreeBSD

2.1 Upgrading from Source

The procedure for doing a source code based update is described in http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/synching.html and http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook//makeworld.html.

The branch tag to use for updating the source is RELENG_8_4 for CVS. For SVN use releng/8.4.


2.2 Upgrading Using “FreeBSD Update”

The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running 7.[01234]-RELEASE, 8.[0123]-RELEASE, 8.4-BETA1, or 8.4-RC[12] can upgrade as follows:

# freebsd-update upgrade -r 8.4-RELEASE

During this process, FreeBSD Update may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update(8) needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install

At this point, users of systems being upgraded from FreeBSD 7.4-RELEASE or earlier will be prompted by freebsd-update to rebuild all third-party applications (e.g., ports installed from the ports tree) due to updates in system libraries.

After updating installed third-party applications (and again, only if freebsd-update(8) printed a message indicating that this was necessary), run freebsd-update(8) again so that it can delete the old (no longer used) system libraries:

# freebsd-update install

Finally, reboot into 8.4-RELEASE

# shutdown -r now

This file, and other release-related documents, can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/.

For questions about FreeBSD, read the documentation before contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.

For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.


Last modified on: May 15, 2021 by Allan Jude