Upgrade to a new version

Hello.

I didn't use my notebook for a long time, but this time I decided to start again.
I have upgraded my old Asus x51rl and decided to reinstall the OS from scratch.

First of all, I checked if a new FreeBSD version was available and it was (v10). Of course, I could download the new version .iso image, but:

1. I had not disk to burn the image;
2. I didn't want to do it.

Fortunately, there was the instruction on how to upgrade FreeBSD to the new version from the previous one. So, I decided to reinstall FreeBSD 9.0 from the disk I had and upgrade the installed OS.

But it was not as easy as it was written in the article.
The first step was completed successfully:

# freebsd-update fetch
# freebsd-update install

After restart uname -a showed me 9.0-RELEASE-p3. Well, I tested the tool and it looked like it worked as it supposed to work.

But the next step:

freebsd-update upgrade -r 10.0-RELEASE

returned me the message:

Cowardly refusing to proceed any further. 

 and exited.

So I decided to run this upgrade in 2 steps:

1. freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.2-RELEASE
2. freebsd-update upgrade -r 10.0-RELEASE

And that did the trick. I successfully upgraded my system to the last 9.2 release. And after that I upgraded it to the release 10.0.

But! There is still the last step: upgrading programs.
It recommends to run:

# portmaster -af

but the issue was that I did not have the program installed yet (I had a clean installation). When I tried to install the program from the ports, I got an error:

Improper use of USE_PERL5 in /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk

or something like that. A short googling advised me to update the port's tree.
What I did:

# cd /usr/ports
# make update

Doing that, I was said, that 'make update' uses portsnap and I have to run:

# portsnap fetch extract

The command started, but failed because of the lack of inodes in /var (I have 2Gb there). A short investigation showed me, that it was because of

/var/db/freebsd-update

which had a lot of little files. So, I cleaned downloaded files, the portsnap file:

/var/db/portsnap/4Fuy78jn&...JHjj78.tgz

 and re-run it in 2 steps:

1. # portsnap fetch
2. # portsnap extract

And that time it completed fully successfully.

Good.

So, the last step was to install portmaster and to run:

# portmaster -af

It was completed successfully and I had FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE with the ports upgraded.

Well done.
Let's start to use it.