# questions on stable etc



## StaticPhilly (May 17, 2010)

hello all,

ok, heres my situation, im after a desktop system thats lightweight, so i was thinking, linux or freebsd...

now the things i like on freebsd
Base installation, gos without any problems, easy to understand
wireless, card automaticlly gets picked up (makes my life easyer) and it has nice wpa support unlike archlinux (which was my other choice)

now my main problem is, when i install freebsd its 8.0-release
now things like firefox cant be installed via pkg_add because they dont exist on for 'release' however after doing some digging i found they do exist in the 8-stable dir's

after doing some reading on 'stable' the only way to upgrade release to stable is to download all the source and compile it myself then have to keep it up-to-date myself.
This sounds like a nightmare and time consuming.

Now for my questions 
is my understanding on upgrading to stable correct?
if it is, is it possible to use the stable binarys via pkg_add from stable on release?
if its not, can you explain the upgrade from release to stable to me?

cheers,
Phil


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## SirDice (May 17, 2010)

Ports have nothing to do with -RELEASE or -STABLE. There is only one ports tree for all versions of FreeBSD.


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## DutchDaemon (May 17, 2010)

And on a -RELEASE you can use packages for -STABLE (see the PACKAGESITE env variable in pkg_add(1)). You _may_ run into the occasional package that depends on a change between -RELEASE and -STABLE, but I believe it's rare.


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