How to upgrade Slackware

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How to upgrade to Slackware-12.0RC1 / Slackware-Current

  1. Get the files.
  2. Prepare yourself.
  3. What not to do.
  4. Read the CURRENT.WARNING.
  5. Read the ChangeLog.
  6. Read the UPGRADE.TXT.
  7. Afterwards.
  8. What if It goes horribly wrong.

1. Get the files

There are several ways to get the files. ncftp, lftp, normal ftp, unofficial isos and ofcourse the most preferred method of all: rsync. Please note that slackware.com does not release isos of -current regardless what state it is is in. So don’t go bothering Patrick Volkerding about them.

If you use rsync take a good mirror (but stay away from primary and mirrors really. Their only purpose is to serve the secondary mirrors faster)

#!/bin/sh
MIRROR=inferno.bioinformatics.vt.edu::slackware/slackware-current
DEST=/path/to/local/slackware
rsync -arvvP --delete $MIRROR $DEST

Please note that the above script with download everything of the slackware-current tree (including sources/kdei). If you don’t want this have a look at rsync(1) and especially the --exclude directive.

2. Prepare yourself

At this point in time, make a nice pot of coffee/tea (or insert $preffered_beverage here. Cause right about now, we got a fair bit of reading to do.

3. What *not* to do

  • Use Slaptget/swaret:
    I don’t care how well it served you in the past. How reliable you think it is. How this is the next best thing to sliced bread. Using tools that do not have a clue on how to upgrade things, will kill your machine; plain and simple. See point 7.
  • Use upgradepkg /path/to/slackware/*/*.tgz
    Same thing really. Because the way computes sort files (alphabetically), certain files get upgraded before others. Most famously bash before glibc-solibs. And as bash is compiled against the newer glibc-solibs, from that moment onwards things will go wrong. badly wrong. See point 7.

4. Read the CURRENT.WARNING

Because this is Slackware-current, it is a development version. Thats why the Current.Warning gets stuck in there (Amazingly enough, many people ignore this). Which means that code can be unstable. Especially pay attention to this part:

Slackware-current is a snapshot of the active Slackware development tree.It is intended to give developers (and other Linux gurus) a chance to test out the latest packages for Slackware. The feedback we get will allow us to make the next stable release better than ever.

So know what you are doing. It really means that occasionally things might go wrong. I know Patrick is doing his level best to avoid this, but it does happen.

5. Read the ChangeLog

See, I told you you would need coffee. A lot of things has changed in Slackware-current/12.0. So there is a pretty long ChangeLog.txt with a lot of text to read and to go “ooh” and “aahh” about.

6. Read the UPGRADE.TXT

The next step and this really is the most important one. And I can’t stress this enough: READ READ READ the UPGRAD.TXT. Failing to follow that and you will kill your machine. (oh and people might just laugh at you for failing to follow it).

Stick to it; religiously. I have done several upgrades (over 4) and it hasn’t failed me. A lot of people (like rworkman) have put a *lot* of work in this document, to make sure the installation is pretty painless.

The point remains, there are some huge changes in slackware-current/12.0. So please be carefull.

6. Afterwards

Even though this is touched in the UPGRADE.TXT, make sure that after you done you do atleast the following:

  1. run lilo to make sure your system can boot.
  2. If nothing else make sure you have atleast a *huge* kernel put in place that can boot your system. It is preferred though to use one of the generic kernels and make an initrd.
  3. search for new files on your system. The most important ones are in /etc/ and you cand find them with: find /etc -name "*.new"
  4. Merge those file. Diff them. you shouldn’t keep any .new files lying around. You could also run slocate and look for other .new files (vimrc’s for example)

7. What if It goes horribly wrong

If  you haven’t followed the instructions and you really managed to screw up your system. You got either of two choices. Either you wipe everything and reinstall or you can try your changes with rworkmans document on “howto repair my botched -current upgrade“

Other than that .. Goodluck!!

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