Looking for a suggestion or some insight.

I installed slackware 10 the other night: full install & gnome desktop as my window manager. I have an ATI 9700pro video card, so I ran the guide that has worked for me before & it worked as usual (dri enabled: glxgears & fgl_glxgears working just fine). Then I downloaded swaret and configured it to hit the linuxpackages sites. I ran swaret --update, then swaret --upgrade.

Here is where the problem starts.
After the upgrade was complete, I rebooted the system and no longer had access to gnome or kde. It gave me errors consisting of "Core keyboard driver not found". I thought that the upgrade might have changed something. So I tried to re-run flgrxconf, the driver installed, & no startx. I was still getting the same error regarding the keyboard. I tried several different keyboard options and nothing seemed to work. I re-ran xorgconfig like I did at installation and I was able to get into gnome (just a 2d desktop).

Any idea what happened?

I played around with it for a few hours and became fed up. So, I reloaded Slack. I am currently in a 2D desktop with gnome. I installed swaret, but haven't ran any updates or upgrades and I haven't installed the Current ATI drivers. The question is: Should I do a system update to bring everything up to current levels, then install the ATI drivers? Install the ATI drivers, run the updates/upgrades & do some config suggestion? or just install the ATI and no system update/upgrade?

any insight, help, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated
thanks

Well, swaret upgraded all packages include X.org, the latest X.org release changed the keyboard driver to keyboard or kbd instead of Keyboard. So next time after upgrading, change a line in your xorg.conf that says Driver "Keyboard" to Driver "keyboard" (or Driver "kbd").
I would recommend to install the drivers after the update, just in case. If you don't want to "fix" stuff then stay with slackware-10 in the update program that will just apply security patchs, else, point to current.
Actually, slackware-current is very stable, but you've to keep an eye on the changelogs and be able to see a difference in a package. IE: the ALSA driver package on slackware-current is compiled for kernel 2.4.27 so if you've kernel 2.4.26 you shouldn't update it.

so maaany screw ups ufter blind "swaret --update, then swaret --upgrade"

When will ppl learn?

Not sure suslik, but you think they would after awhile.....


You still have to read the changelogs. I would suggest you do that right away monkey. There have been other things besides the keyboard call. Some apps have been dropped and some added. Swaret or slapt-get are not, nor will they ever be apt-get, unless Pat V decides to change his package management setup to include dependency checking.

Thanks for the quick responses. You are probably right suslik, the blind update thing was not a good idea. I was just trying to stay current with my packages, I was programmed by windows methodology... install and immediately update. The question is: How do you know when or what to update?

Thanks gbonvehi, I will try to remember that. If I do the update, where would I find changelogs? when I ran the update to get the list of current packages, it showed a ton of things not installed.

for current:
ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackwar.../ChangeLog.txt