Thinkpad R32 5.3 -> 5.4 migration woes

[Lee Parsons]

I have previously ran 5.2 and 5.3 on my thinkpad R32.  After having had some
recent hardware difficulties on my system, I thought I would wipe my freebsd
partition and reinstall with 5.4.  

I have repartioned my slice, which should have formatted the partitions that
I made (/, /usr, /var, and a swap).  I then proceeded to install from CD.

I have made three attempts to install 5.4, and have not yet succeeded in
getting X to set up in any way.  For that matter, even installing simple
programs like vim has been unsuccessful.  If I use sysinstall, I will get
errors about the dependencies already being installed.  

For example, if something needs Perl 5.8.6, I will get an error that 5.8.5
is already installed.  In this case, I then used "make deinstall", followed
my "make reinstall" for perl to resolve this.  Large packages like KDE3 will
generate about a half-dozen or more dependency version errors and then give
up.

I have reformatted every time that I have tried installing 5.4.   Are there
programs on the 5.4 CDs (such as perl) that are present in multiple, similar
versions?  

More importantly, is there a way to get sysinstall to use "pkg_add -f" in
its installation so that the packages will upgrade rather than barf out
errors to me and give up?

thanks
Lee