newb questions

[kern]

hi, I'm slowly getting used to this, I've been on slack for a good time so I know my way about.. anyway. I'll fire these off here

whats the best way to upgrade?,
I have 5.3 running, and the sysinstall 'upgrade' option seems to fail on some packages, on _any mirror I give it, I'm not sure why, before trying this I tried recompiling everything using portupgrade -Rra, which took a while considering its a celeron 566, but it failed on KDE. anyway, both options I've tried have failed, can someone point me in the right direction?

whats the equivelent of 'init 5 (slack)' in BSD? so it boots into my desktop login manager (KDM in this instance)

uh, thats about it for now, I guess, apart from I can't get remote X working from slack->BSD, although it works from BSD->slack's display . so I dont know quite whats going on there..

should I have inetd? last time I installed it it had SSHD commented out, although the SSHD was still running and allowing connections, odd.

I'm just not used to it, please dont attack me

the freebsd.org manual site is awesome for help, but does anyone have a 'transition guide' or a quick tips and tricks guide, that would be great,

whats the best way to keep the ports updated.. vis cvsup? I use that in my own script at present, seems to do ok.

is it bad to compile my own stuff and place it in /opt for example and manually path it up? I noticed the ports tree has older versions for some things like Xchat and Firefox, so I just wonder if I can manually add them, .



does anyone use automount/autofs? I understand fbsd may not be suited to a desktop OS, I just want to test its usibility thats all.


thanks - for anyone who took the time to answer this mess

[cheetahman]

Have you tried this link
http://www.freebsd.org/projects/newbies.html

And this to upgrade to 5.4
http://www.beyrent.net/drupal/?q=comment/reply/39

[darkprince]

FreeBSD ports are actually kept VERY well up to date.

The best way to keep your ports up to date is, yes, of course cvsup. and portupgrade -Rra is not a good thing to be doing. Besides the fact it takes forever there's just no need to be doing it!

Why are you using sysinstall to do an upgrade? are you booting from a cd?

The best way to upgrade the kernel and userland is to follow the procedure in the freebsd handbook. (cvsup the new src)

to get freebsd to boot into KDM you will need to edit /etc/ttys . in this file you will just need to uncomment a line (this is also covered in the freebsd handbook)

If you are having problems with X-forwarding you may need to ssh -X or edit /usr/local/etc/ssh/sshd_config

[kern]

thanks for the upgrading link , trying it out now,

I've been on that newbie page on the main fbsd site too hehe

ah multiple formats-after-corrupting-ports-later