Updating FreeBSD to 7.1

This last weekend I updated my home server to FreeBSD 7.1.  Over the last year I've used freebsd-update to update it to BETA1, RC1, and RC2.  Going from BETA1 to anything else was kind of a pain because freebsd-update looks online for files from the current system during the upgrade, and they pulled the BETA files offline when they put out the RC files.  So I had to use a command to convince freebsd-update that I was using a different version to get it to run.

The last update from RC2 to RELEASE was a breeze.  Basically 3 commands and a reboot before the last command.  Kudos to the developer of freebsd-update.  I've liked FreeBSD for some time, and this just makes it that much better.

Some background on my environment.  I use FreeBSD as a headless server on an old Dell machine (almost 10 years old and it's still running with only a hard drive change during that time).  I use OpenSolaris on a Gateway laptop and have a old iMac for the family computer.

I wanted OpenSolaris on my development machine (the laptop) because I do a lot of Java programming at home and hoped that would be a good environment for that.  For Java development it has been fantastic.  For an operating system for this laptop, not so much.  I can't use the wireless network, audio is kinda flaky, and the machine overheats a lot (I think that is more the laptop's issue, not OpenSolaris', but OpenSolaris never throttles the processor, so I have to have a fan on it the whole time, a big house fan).  However, after using VirtualBox, zfs, and the Java environment on OpenSolaris, I like it for a development machine.

One issue I find somewhat funny is I cannot get the latest version of Gnucash to run on OpenSolaris, so I run Gnucash on the FreeBSD box and export the display to the laptop.  Works well, but it is a little slow (remember the 'BSD box is almost 10 years old).  A side benefit of this setup is I can run it from the iMac as well.