The &os; Project $FreeBSD$ 2012 The &os; Documentation Project &tm-attrib.freebsd; &tm-attrib.intel; &tm-attrib.sparc; &tm-attrib.general; This article gives some brief instructions on installing &os; &release.current; and upgrading the systems running earlier releases. 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: The procedure for doing a source code based update is described in and . The branch tag to use for updating the source is RELENG_8_3 for CVS. For SVN use releng/8.3. The &man.freebsd-update.8; utility supports binary upgrades of &arch.i386; and &arch.amd64; systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running 7.[01234]-RELEASE, 8.[012]-RELEASE, 8.3-BETA1, or 8.3-RC[12] can upgrade as follows: &prompt.root; freebsd-update upgrade -r 8.3-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. &prompt.root; freebsd-update install The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing. &prompt.root; shutdown -r now After rebooting, &man.freebsd-update.8; needs to be run again to install the new userland components: &prompt.root; 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 &man.freebsd-update.8; printed a message indicating that this was necessary), run &man.freebsd-update.8; again so that it can delete the old (no longer used) system libraries: &prompt.root; freebsd-update install Finally, reboot into &release.current; &prompt.root; shutdown -r now