Yes, the first update for VirtualBSD is finally available and applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, VLC, Transmission and many more will be updated to the most recent version available at the time of writing (April 15, 2009).
Unfortunately, since we wanted to make the upgrade process as smooth and simple as possible, there's no way to update a single application. Also, this update is really meant to be applied on top of a (more or less) plain VirtualBSD installation (like the one you end up with after unpacking VirtualBSD.zip for the first time).
That said, here's the instructions:
1) Recommended: make sure VirtualBSD is not running and make a backup copy of its folder (or icon, if you're using Mac OS X).
2) Boot VirtualBSD, launch Firefox, download Update1-2009.tgz (about 37 MB) and save it somewhere.
WARNING: From now on you are expected to be working as root!
3) Open a terminal (right click anywhere on the desktop and select Terminal from the menu).
4) Since you can't "sudo everything" in VirtualBSD, you need to become root. Type:
su -
and type the password (root4u) when prompted to do so.
5) Move to the directory where you saved Update1-2009.tgz and unpack it:
tar xzvf Update1-2009.tgz
6) Move inside the newly created directory:
cd UPDATES
7) You will see a few files, but at the moment the one we care about is bigUpdate, so execute it:
./bigUpdate
WARNING: Make sure you take the time to read the message being displayed before committing to the upgrade process: once you do, there's no turning back!
8) Once it's done (after a good couple of hours) it would be wise to reboot VirtualBSD. If you do (which you really should), repeat step 3) and 4) and move into the UPDATES directory again;
8) Optional: upgrade the Linux packages and plugins:
./linuxUpdate
9) Optional: install Miro (a.k.a. Democracy Player):
./installMiro
10) Optional: install Google Gadgets:
./installGoogleGadgets
11) Reboot and verify that everything is working normally! ;-)
12) Optional: follow these instructions to reclaim some disk space.