[Loop]

I have a system that will not boot from CDROM and the last floppyies that worked were 5.0-RELEASE. I want to bring this up to 5.2.1-RELEASE, and since there are no packages for 5.0 anymore I can't install cvsup. As far as I can see, I can either:

a) use cvs to get the sources with the tag 5.2.1-RELEASE
or
b) download everything in the src directory from an ftp site, and use the install.sh file to extract the files

correct?

[socomm]

Correct. (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/synching.html)

[Strog]

You could still get cvsup by building it as a port. You could grab the latest ports.tar.gz tarball off the ftp and then install the port. There's a warning in the UPDATING file that you should heed regardless of how you grab the source (thanks to Soup4you2 for bringing this to my attention when it came out). If you use RELENG_5_2 for your tag then you will get 5.2.1p3 unless you really wanted RELEASE and want to patch it manually afterwards.

[code:1:1599680f76]
20031112:
The statfs structure has been updated with 64-bit fields to
allow accurate reporting of multi-terabyte filesystem
sizes. You should build world, then build and boot the new kernel
BEFORE doing a `installworld' as the new kernel will know about
binaries using the old statfs structure, but an old kernel will
not know about the new system calls that support the new statfs
structure.
Note that the backwards compatibility is only present when the
kernel is configured with the COMPAT_FREEBSD4 option. Since
even /bin/sh will not run with a new kernel without said option
you're pretty much dead in the water without it. Make sure you
have COMPAT_FREEBSD4!
Running an old kernel after a `make world' will cause programs
such as `df' that do a statfs system call to fail with a bad
system call. Marco Wertejuk <wertejuk@mwcis.com> also reports
that cfsd (ports/security/cfs) needs to be recompiled after
these changes are installed.


****************************DANGER**************** ***************

DO NOT make installworld after the buildworld w/o building and
installing a new kernel FIRST. You will be unable to build a
new kernel otherwise on a system with new binaries and an old
kernel.[/code:1:1599680f76]

You could do the binary upgrade if you wanted to. I've done both ways and either works fine. My biggest issue with one of my boxes was that I hadn't run portupgrade for a while. It was a lot of work upgrading everything to the latest but the actual upgrade went without too much trouble. I ended up doing a pkg_delete \* and starting fresh.