In the past I have provided instructions on performing a binary upgrade from FreeBSD 4.8 to FreeBSD 4.11, a binary upgrade from FreeBSD 5.3 to FreeBSD 5.4, and a binary upgrade from FreeBSD 5.4 to FreeBSD 6.0, but they have all involved multiple steps and some understanding on the part of the user. Using my newly written script should make FreeBSD 6.0 to FreeBSD 6.1 upgrades a bit easier; and since this script uses patches generated by bsdiff it uses far less bandwidth -- around 15-20MB, compared to 650MB for downloading a complete release ISO image.
Note that this script only works for the i386 platform. It will refuse to run on alpha, amd64, pc98, or sparc64 systems.
# cd /usr/ # fetch http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-upgrade-6.0-to-6.1/upgrade-6.0-to-6.1.tgz # sha256 upgrade-6.0-to-6.1.tgzThe hash displayed should be 29075fc5711e0b20d879c69d12bbe5414c1c56d597c8116da7acc0d291116d2f.
Note: This script needs quite a lot of disk space (anywhere from a couple hundred MB to almost a GB, depending upon which parts of FreeBSD you have installed), so if you decide not to download and extract it in /usr/, make sure you pick somewhere which has lots of free space.
# tar -xzf upgrade-6.0-to-6.1.tgz # cd upgrade && ./upgrade.sh
If the script has trouble merging your configuration files with changes which occurred between FreeBSD 6.0 and FreeBSD 6.1, it will ask you to perform the merge manually. This isn't likely to happen unless you've modified lots of files in /etc which people don't often touch.