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kersten78 09-21-2004 09:40 PM

(swaret==broken slackware)? TRUE
 
Hello again everybody.
In my neverending need to tinker, I made a complete mess of my system.
I decided to try out swaret with VERSION=current.
I updated everything.
Slack is broken.
Alsa doesn't work.
Xorg is having major problems
Fluxbox is having all sorts of distorted display problems
Mozilla is having odd problems, never ending stopwatch, various gui problems
etc.
etc.
and who knows what else might turn up.

Major headache. Does anyone know if there's a way to revert to old packages? I tried setting the version back to 10.0 thinking it might see that the old packages were changed...nope. Looked through the man pages and I didn't see anything about reversing the update. Good grief.
Any help would be GREATLY appreciated....I created a helluva mess.
I'm in waaay over my head once again...:D
-Kris

Smokey 09-21-2004 10:04 PM

Im pretty positive you installed the 1.6.2 version of swaret which looks for depencies from the old swaret.org site.

remove your current swaret installation, removepkg swaret and rm -rf /etc/swaret.conf

then install the development packages and edit /etc/swaret.conf

xushi 09-21-2004 10:39 PM

did you rename they keyboard driver from
"Keyboard"
to
"kbd"
in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

predator.hawk 09-21-2004 11:38 PM

Alot of things have chaned in Slackware Current, heres a few.

1. Fluxbox 0.1.14 (what ships with Slackware 10) was replaced with Fluxbox 0.9.10, Theming changed ALOT since 0.1.14 in fluxbox 0.9.10. Try using some other themes.

2. Xorg upgraded to 6.8.1, ALOT changed in Xorg (way to much to list). The Keyboard Driver is no longer called keyboard, its now kbd.

and alot of other things changed, slackware current is bleeding edge and some things MIGHT be broken. But, my Slackware Install is sorta a Combo of Compiled Stuff, LinuxPackages.net stuff, Slackware Stable Stuff and Slackware Current Stuff. But you can uninstall packages like fluxbox, xorg and other. Use a non x terminal to mount the first install disk and install all the packages from there.

Edit: on the alsa part, chances are swaret installed ALSA 1.0.6a_2.4.27, by default swaret doesn't upgrade the kernel and those packages are compiled for the 2.4.27 kernel included in the latest -current tree.

kersten78 09-22-2004 12:06 AM

xushi and predator, that was the main problem. I could not get a keyboard to load with X, so it always terminated in an error. The problem is that I didn't realize that the kbd driver was changed, so I changed a bunch of other settings. Now I have a mess... like I said, I'm waaaaaaay in over my head and I'm fairly new to slack. I may be able to repair it, but it may be easier to reinstall and learn from the mistakes I made. At this point, I've made so many ignorant changes, it may be better to start from slack. Shucks. Yep. Decided. It's better to start from scratch. I'll post back upon reinstall.
-Kris

kersten78 09-22-2004 12:07 AM

Actually, whaddya think about Debian? I may try that...

Since I'm gonna reinstall anyway, I may as well try Debian. In the spirit of tinkering... I'll post back.

BajaNick 09-22-2004 01:06 AM

Just some advice but I would stick with slack. I have found out that jumping around distro to distro is much more of a pain that trying to fix problems with whatever your working on now. I jumped from Mandrake to RH back to mandrake and finally settled with slack and wish I would have tried slack first.:)

wpyh 09-22-2004 01:49 AM

Well... I suggest you try to fix the problem yourself than reinstall, since reinstalling doesn't have much to do with tinkering ;)

kersten78 09-22-2004 03:20 AM

Sticking with slack. It's taught me too much in the last 2 weeks--can't just ditch it, so I gotta keep at it. But I am going to reinstall. Yeah, it's a cop-out, but last time I just chose the full install. I figure this time I'll try to slim it down a bit, and then update selectively (if at all) with swaret. I'll probably run into a bunch of dependency problems and want to tear out my hair...but what the heck. If it just worked out of the box, I'd be bored and ignorant. heh. sick. Anyway, thanks for the input. I'll be back shortly.:D

major.tom 09-22-2004 04:39 AM

I'm guessing that some of your problems may be due to swaret (which I use, but lately not so much for updating; mainly to tell me what's out-of-date) using mirrors that are not yet up-to-date with ftp.slackware.com. My experience anyway was that some mirrors were slow to update, due most likely to heavy load on the slackware server.

It's a good idea, too, to check the changelogs. Patrick's good about putting gotchas in there. And I've gotten into the habit of following the UPDATE.TXT instructions and going into single user mode (telinit 1) before updating anything. I'm not sure if it makes a difference, but if P.V. says so, I'll take his word for it.

For fluxbox, I don't know if this is 100% necessary, but I also copy the config files (init, keys, menu) from the /usr/X11R6/share/fluxbox folder to my ~/.fluxbox. I only have a few custom menu items, so I back it up before copying and update the new menu file manually.

If you're having real problems, it might be a good idea to re-install slack-10 again, find a mirror that's fast and up-to-date (I like carroll.cac.psu.edu -- it's good in the evenings, but I usually can't connect to it during the day) follow the Changelog and you should be set.

Good luck,

Garry

Hangdog42 09-22-2004 07:42 AM

Of course there is always the option of just pointing swaret at slackware-10 instead of slackware-current. You can avoid a lot of headaches that way.

rotvogel 09-22-2004 09:03 AM

If you choose to run bleeding edge development versions of software like Slackware-current at the moment, you allways take the risk of a broken system.

If you want to avoid that, just run a stable version of Slack. :)

kersten78 09-22-2004 11:32 AM

Yeah, if I use swaret after reinstall, it's definitely going to point to version 10. I have no business trying to hack through bleeding edge stuff. yet.:study:

Sidenote, when I was installing, I got a weird error trying to run cfdisk. For some reason it couldn't read or access my hard drive--I don't remember the exact message, and I'm at school now so I can't make it happen again. Anyway, I skipped it and all my partitions were still there and readable. So I formatted, installed, configured, etc. But now I'm having the same lilo problem that I had last time I installed. When I boot, it says searching for boot record...OK. And then all get is:
99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 etc etc etc. with a hanging system. Whenever I boot from floppy and run liloconfig, I get a message that it encountered an error. Last time I installed, i just edited lilo.conf to reflect my setup. I have lilo written to the MBR (/dev/hda) and partitions /dev/hdb1 at / and /dev/hdb2 at /home. /dev/hdb1 is tagged bootable, and my lilo.conf reflects this setup. However, this time around, it's not solving the problem. I still get the 99 99 99 99 boot...heh. I'm gonna have to mess with it more tonight. If anybody has any ideas, let me know. Maybe I'll try to write lilo to the root partition. I'm pretty sure that gave me the same error as writing to the MBR, though. Oh well, I'll figure it out eventually...I did last time. Maybe I'll take some notes this time so I can remember exactly what I did.:rolleyes:

lupin_the_3rd 09-22-2004 11:49 AM

"bleeding edge" is probably not very accurate... most of the stuff in current can be a drop in replacement for the regular version... obviously, exclude your kernel (best done by hand) and alsa (also best done by hand 9 times out of 10 to get support for just your soundcard)... This is slackware afterall, P.V. doesn't typically put in stuff until it's ready for shipping with the next release (lool at KDE 3.3 in /testing still). Most problems with swaret tend to be from people using linuxpackages repos.

I just use it to upgrade... you may as well... but it's never caused a problem for me... ever...

kersten78 09-22-2004 12:05 PM

Yeah, it was more my fault that swaret's. My need to tinker went completely out of control, and I decided to upgrade every possible package that swaret could find. Including alsa, xorg, a bunch of libs, etc. Nothing that really needed to be upgraded, because the system was working perfectly fine. But if my system works like it's supposed to for more than a couple days, I get bored and HAVE to find something else to screw with. I guess you have to learn some how. If it isn't broken, there's no sense in fixing it--that's why you have to break things every once in a while. Heh. I think that's gotta be my official quote...that perfectly sums up my existence as a linux user.


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