Hello everyone,

I am using a virtual machine with Slackware 13.1, where the original 2.6.36 kernel was updated to 3.12.20.

Furthermore, it runs X.Org X Server 1.7.7, which I would like to update.
I would like to know if it is possible to do so and, what are the correct steps to do so.

AFAIK, several packages are required, and the process can be a nightmare :S

Any help is appreciated. Regards.

hi lopezavila69, welcome to LQ!

as it could be much easier and faster, have you thought about installing another virtual machine with a more recent version of the operating system (and of X.Org)?

is there something preventing you to do this? I ask because it might be easier to solve this other problem instead of trying to update X.Org on the vm you have.

To give you an idea of what it took to upgrade Mesa on a 14.1 installation, it required a lot of trial and error... and a lot of compile time. I tried to upgrade Mesa to get hardware h264 decoding on my card that was introduced with the 3.18 kernel and Mesa 10.4. 14.1 uses the 3.10.17 kernel and Mesa 9.1.7. To upgrade to a newer version of Mesa, I had to recompile 284 packages (most of which, 276, were recompiling X itself). But it did require both llvm and qt, both of which require a lot of CPU time for compiling (especially on my 7 year old system).

The reason I mention that is because my system was still semi-recent (at least in comparison to yours) and I still required a lot of compile time to resolve dependency issues. While it is certainly possible to upgrade xorg, the list of dependencies that would need to be upgraded would be far greater than mine and I doubt anyone could give you an actual list, so you'd have a lot of compile attempts that would fail and then you'd need to track down what is causing it and hope you can just upgrade a dependency and just hope that the new dependency doesn't require additional dependencies to upgrade that.

It would certainly be easier to just follow ponce's advice and install a new virtual machine with a more up-to-date Slackware. Then you could migrate anything you need over from the old system. If you choose to do this, I would read through the UPGRADE.TXT for each release after 13.1, as it should help give you information on what configs might need to be changed. Most should probably transfer relatively easy. You could also just upgrade your current VM, but to get to 14.1, you need to upgrade to each previous release, following the information in the UPGRADE.TXT for that release. So you'd need to go from 13.1 to 13.37, then to 14.0, and then finally to 14.1. Both of these options will require a lot of time and effort, but I'd imagine it'd be substantially less time than trying to upgrade xorg itself.

I find that your recompile of a lot of packages to be most curious, because when I upgrade mesa (mine is at 10.6.3, the latest at time of post), all I had to do was compile both a native x86_64 and a i586 version (in a VM, since I run x86_64), convert the i586 package to a -compat32 version, run 'upgradepkg' on both packages, and reboot into console mode-->uninstall Catalyst-->reboot back into console mode-->reinstall Catalyst-->reboot into KDE. No other recompiling of any other packages were necessary to get a working system.

I wasn't running -current (and I'm still not) and this was before -current supported that high of a release of mesa. I had to upgrade several packages further than what -current offered at the time (December). Most of the others, including X, I downloaded the source and slackbuilds from -current and recompiled them (a few I just needed to recompile the 14.1 versions to deal with the updated libs). During that process, usually while compiling X, a program compile would fail due to outdated dependencies, so I'd then have to download the source and slackbuild for that. It led to programs I wouldn't have expected to need to update like qt. Then there's the fun part of seeing your xorg build finish, only to check the output directory and find that several individual builds had failed and then tracking down the reason for those failures and fixing it. I probably started the x slackbuild at least 20 times before I had a completely successful build without any failures.

Looking through my notes, I upgraded:

autoconf 2.69 (recompiled)
automake 1.11.5 -> 1.14.1
libdrm 2.4.46 -> 2.4.58
libelf 0.8.13 (recompiled)
libevdev 1.2 (added)
llvm 3.3 -> 3.4.2
mesa 9.1.7 -> 10.4
qt 4.8.5 -> 4.8.6
xorg 1.14.3 -> 1.15.2 (this was just the server version, but I didn't want to list each xorg package individually, since it was 276 packages)

After all this was done, I needed to do it all again on a 32bit VM so I could get my multilib -compat32 packages updated to match the 64bit packages (since I was doing this for the major advancements with my ATI video card with kernel 3.18 and mesa 10.4 and many games still require 32bit).

Thank you everybody for your quick help and efforts to explain the process.
In this case, maybe the best option is to create another virtual machine with an updated Linux distribution, such as Slackware 14.1 or event an Ubuntu 14.04.

Best regards!