Hello all. I have just a couple of newbie questions about the swaret program.

I've just gotten my system set up with Slack 9.1, and everything (finally) seems to be working well, more or less. I've been hearing more and more about swaret, and now I see that Slack 10 is out, so I had a few questions about it. First, is this utility reliable? I read an article online (I can't find it now) advising people not to use it since it makes changes to your system with your knowing what's happening and it sometimes messes things up. Second, if it is reliable and used by many happy Slack users, what exactly will it upgrade? Since I'm on 9.1 now, will it upgrade everything to Slack 10? Will it leave all the configuration files/settings alone and just upgrade the programs? How about the kernel? Will the entire kernel be upgraded (keeping the old settings) and then the vmlinuz file replaced with the new one, or does it not change the kernel? Finally, how about changing the version itself... will you achieve the same result upgrading 9.1 as installing 10 from scratch? I ask because I recently downloaded a kernel patch to upgrade by one level, but I notice a few places (primarily the logon screen) still have the version number of the old kernel, so I'm wondering if swaret does this (upgrades everything but leaves all the numbers the same). I just don't want to get folders lying around everywhere with old version numbers and cause confusion later on (I've already run into a problem with the kernel issue where a program was trying to install something module-related into a folder with the old name and it was failing for some reason).

Sorry for all the questions and for my ignorance, I don't know much about upgrading things in Linux yet. I'd appreciate any info that can help lead me in the right direction. Thanks!

There are dozens of these threads on this forum. I would suggest you search the Board, read all of them. If you have specific questions after that then ask again. You will see that some people love swaret others would not wish it on their mother in law.

Essentially, Swaret is potentially a handy tool, but it is by no means a panacaea, and can cause trouble if you don't allow for its limitations. Search the forums for threads about it, and then decide for yourself whether to risk it or not. And make sure you read the documentation carefully before you try to use it.

i also advice you to do a
man swaret ; less /etc/swaret.conf
Do not trust everything people they on the net, some of them just talk nonsense, or don't know enough about what they talk about...

that is true, that is why you want to look for patterns of results.

Ive had good luck with it. Heres a link to the FAQ on the swaret Website:

http://www.swaret.org/?menu=faq

and a link to the swaret forum:

http://forum.swaret.org/

Thanks for the info... I did do a search and read through some of the threads, but I didn't find answers to some of the specific questions I asked above. I'll go look at them in more detail though to see what I can find.

talk about revival !