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(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 |
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 |
did you rename they keyboard driver from
"Keyboard" to "kbd" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf |
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. |
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 |
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. |
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.:)
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Well... I suggest you try to fix the problem yourself than reinstall, since reinstalling doesn't have much to do with tinkering ;)
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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
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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 |
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.
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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. :) |
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: |
"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... |
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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This is slackware though... once it works... leave it... and enjoy you're free time by slacking off... ;)
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kersten, i've always updated to current my machines and never had a problem (of course i excluded what is exclued by defautl, kernel, devs, etc and compiled by hand that). When i upgraded to latest X.org release i created a new xorg.conf with X -configure and all went good. Then only thing you need to check after update to current is to look for .new config files. You can use locate .new and it will drop (most of them) the configuration files that are new and you should check as by default it doesn't replace any of them, it creates one with .new extention.
After all, if you've just made a new install, try -current if you still get all messed up, reinstall again because you haven't configured too much, and stick with -10 :) |
I had the same problem when I did a swaret --upgrade -a ... X wouldn't load, all kinds of errors... I did a "xorgconfig" after I logged into the command line - with no x loaded, I used "ctrl+F6" to get to a command line.
Rebuild your xorg.conf file this way and it'll start again... It took a reboot after this to get the alsa module re-loaded (for me, anyhow...). After all the work I put into this distro, I wasn't about to give up easy and re-install. |
Also, An idea for using Xorg 6.8.1 in the future, make a new config file (say, xorg.conf-6.8.1) with all your settings, in case you screw up when editing the orginal :P. i always keep a copy of my xorg.conf, lilo.conf and a few others on hand that i know works.
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I have been using Slackware current for a while now and have not really noticed anything broken, because the packages are well tested before they are placed in current. I agree with the author of the post above always keep a backup of all your important configuration files.
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You shouldn't just blindly update using swaret, allways look at the changelog before
you do an upgrade. Bookmark this : http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=i386 |
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I've posted similar problems in this thread http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=232892
I still haven't been able to find the cause or the solution. I just know the problems started after the last update. |
Thanks for all the info everybody. Obviously I didn't do enough research before I started my updating frenzy.:D I'm sure that I'll be able to update without any trouble next time--just based on what I've learned from this thread! You really can't beat the slack community.
Anyway, this is assuming I ever get it to boot.... edit: nevermind, it's all up and running again....now, I just have to decide if I really want to try my luck with swaret again... |
I've been reading posts in FAR-TOO-MANY-PLACES! about problems others are having with X 6.8.1 and it appears that the majority have nothing the do with the keyboard-->kbd change; most of the problems are with screen issues. Now I'm not so sure it is X that is causing the problem. Last night I uninstalled 6.8.1 and reinstalled 6.7.0 and the problems that I've described earlier ( http://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...threadid=232892) still happen.
I've been using Slackware for almost a year now and this is the worst problem I've encountered. Is there anything else in the September 19th update that would cause problems with the way objects are drawn on the screen? Are there any logs I could read to find clues? Kent |
Well, not changing the Keyboard driver to kbd results in a No screens found error (but I don't think that's what you mean;) ). I have no problems with the new drivers in current (actually they even seem a bit faster to me). I'm not sure where your problems stem from... xorg logs are one place to look... i
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