slackpkg question . . .
 

I just installed Linux 11.0 from a CD set, then installed slackpkg in order to get the latest and greatest. I ran slackpkg, but, when I checked my /etc/slackware-version file, it still had 11.0.

My question - does slackpkg update the /etc/slackware-version file?

Hi and welcome to LQ.

I'm assuming you've installed Slackware 11.0. Is that right? There's no such thing as "Linux 11.0"
I'd recommend you install a more up to date version of Slackware. It's been 13.37 for the last 8 months. Alternatively, you may also try some other distributions.


To answer your questions, if slackpkg mirrors point to Slackware 11.0, it'll always say 11.0. What you could do is change the mirrors to 13.37 and try to upgrade your system. I don't, however, recommend it as there's been too many changes between 11.0 and 13.37. I'd go to the slackware website and download the latest one.

Sorry about that, I did mean slackware 11.0. Also, my mirrors were set for 13.37 when I ran the slackpkg. However, I will go to the web site and download the latest.

Thank you for the speedy reply.

No worries. That would be the best course of action. Theoretically, it'd be possible to upgrade from 11.0 to 13.37 but as there have been 5 stable releases between 11.0 and 13.37, it'd probably be doomed to fail (unless performed by some seasoned slacker)

In the future, if you want to update your system, you can follow the following steps;
Have fun.

wasn't there some big changes between versions 12.0 and 13.1, that caused incompatibility between 12.0 and bellow with 13.1 and above. if this is the case upgrading wont work successfully. everyone else recommends downloading the newest version, and that's probably the best thing to do. slackpkg comes with slackware 13.37 just to give you a heads up, so that should be convenient for you.

It is possible to upgrade from versions earlier than 13.1, played around with it one day when I had nothing better to do, here is the short version of how to do it

To upgrade from previous versions of slackware this works

1. Edit slackpkg.mirrors to point at mirror of version to upgrade
2. Run "slackpkg update" "slackpkg upgrade tgz" "slackpkg install tgz"
3. Edit you slackpkg.mirrors again and slackpkg.blacklist to allow updating of aaa_elflibs
4. slackpkg install-new
5. slackpkg upgrade-all
6. Depending on version upgrading from may need to edit /etc/fstab to reflect the change in naming of ide drives from hda to sda if you have ide drives.
7. rerun liloconfig