This is a page I'm keeping explicitly for upgrading lagoon, Yvonne's computer. It's probably not of much use to anybody except me.

1 October 2014

Upgrade lagoon from FreeBSD 8.2 to 10.0.

• Migrating home with rsync:

  rsync -lKzavP --delete-after /lagoon/home /home

• Modify /etc/rc.conf: system name and IP address

• Modify /etc/fstab accordingly

• xearth is a version that I hacked nearly 20 years ago and subsequently lost the source, so I've been dragging along the binaries for that period of time. It's amazing that they still run. But now, of course, there are library dependencies to address.

• kklondike is one of Keith Packard's kgames that once were distributed with X. They, too, have suffered configuration rot, and I can no longer build them. So I also migrate this program in binary form, and again there are missing library dependencies.

• Install a down-rev version of the nVidia display driver. This machine is only a few years old, but the chip set is already “obsolete”.

• My weather software didn't run any more. Or at least, not reliably. Calls to the libusb project functions failed with EBUSY. Why that? I noted during development of the software, nearly 5 years ago, that FreeBSD had timing problems, while NetBSD didn't. It seems that this is related. Hacked the software provisionally to get it to work at least some of the time, though there can be gaps of up to 10 minutes between readings. How do you debug this sort of thing?