Since I have about a billion 3rd party applications installed, the upgrade process can be somewhat interesting at times. This time around I uninstalled acroread first, since in previous upgrades, that package has caused the upgrade process to abort.
Now that my internet is on Shaw instead of Telus, the download time was pretty short. But then the upgrade seemed to be stuck for a long time at the same point, it was not until I expanded the terminal that I found there was an ncurses dialog...

My first attempt to upgrade to Karmic was met with an error about ubuntu-minimal missing. The problem being the mirror I had selected was not synced with the new distro yet. (The "Select Best Server" option probably thought it was a good mirror precisely because nobody was downloading thousands of packages from it yet) So after switching to a different mirror, the upgrade went pretty smoothly.

In addition to the improvements one can find on many another review, a few things...

The upgrade from slack 12.1 to slack 12.2 went fairly well. There were only a few issues, mostly with third party packages.

On the first boot, rc.serial made a lot of output complaining of nonexistant devices. But this was only a one time occurrence.

fbpager no longer works with the new fluxbox, but there has been some recent development with fbpager so there may be a new release at some point that will solve this. Tried fluxter with no success. For now I have switched...

So after I upgraded to Slackware 12 from 11, this strange problem arose with Eterm. I could use vim a couple of times, then thereafter it would not work. I'd type in the command, and the cursor would go to the next line and just sit there. I couldn't type in anything, couldn't even Ctrl-C out of it and would have to close the window. It would continue to behave this way until I rebooted. Other things such as the links browser would also not work, but text editing with elvis still functioned...

So the concept of patching the kernel to update to the next release is something I haven't delved into too much before. I've had previous experiences of trying to use the patch command that didn't go over too well. The syntax of the patch command is something that is simple when understood. Yet being slightly different from other commands, it can look a bit scary to a newbie. For instance, what number am I supposed to put with the p? But when I actually sat down to try it, it was actually quite...