To be honest, I'm not very familiar with swaret, so I'm certainly not a definitive source for information on it.
I've recently written a short document about third party package management on SlackWiki.org - have a look at this and see if it addresses your concerns adequately: http://slackwiki.org/Third_Party_Package_Managers

There is nothing wrong with current, if you upgrade it properly. Using swaret you might mess it up.

Yes, the trick is to read the changelog.

Agreed. Using 'current' is fine but only as long as you have first upgraded *manually* to current. Otherwise, if you install Slack 11 and just think you can change to version=current and magically get your whole system upgraded, you will soon find out that you are wrong!!

I'll check out that document, rworkman. I don't have any problems with package management or upgrades but I was confused by what was said about swaret. That's why I just wanted to clarify.

Thanks for the replies.

you are a genius!

Hi guys,

I've shamefully been away from linux for a long time.

And I've completely forgotten what config file I change to change from Fluxbox to KDE.

I'm sure it'll come back to me once I see it

cheers

Run xwmconfig and select KDE

Eric

great howto here only thing I have run into is configuring my mail, sending to my webbased mail is not working I have opened port 25 through my router and verified my dyndns address after opening and configuring httpd on 80 but cannot send mail outside of my system. Thanks for any help.

shane


sorry dropped in the wrong thread

Hi there,
Although I'm not a newbie, I did read all of the information written here and I think it's really useful for all of us ! I really want to thank you for sharing this with us. I strongly recommend this tutorial to all of the newbies. It will not teach you what exactly will happen when you start but it will provide you with strong information what to do




Btw I once had a pc that had that annoying "beep" sound. It was a real pain in the ass until I found myself ( after 2 days of searching ) !

very nice

You're doing the community a great service,
and if I hadn't already run into these headaches you would've saved me WEEKS.
thanks ALOT!

Hello,

I read your Wiki page and thanks for that. I've been using
slackupdate.sh from DarkLinux for years with almost 100%
good results. The one time it didn't work correctly was
a kernel upgrade on Slackware 12.0 which upgraded kernel-2.6.21.5-smp to kernel-2.6.21.5-smp_Slack12.0 and this broke my madwifi package
so that my Dlink-DWL650 Atheros based 802.11g wireless card
would not work anymore. The error was 'can't find kernel-modules'
and the solution was to go back to the previous kernel and
reinstall the madwifi package. That said, my one experience
with swaret was bad, though in fairness I wasn't familiar enough
with it to use it correctly.

On your Wiki Page you commented about third party package
management using non-official sources. Good point. But
using slackupdate.sh from DarkLinux I notice that packages
always come from official sources though if you messed
around with it enough you could break it!

Again, thanks for the Wiki Page.

The GNUinator

The *real* solution was to just recompile madwifi.
The kernel upgrade was to fix a local root hole, so if you've got any untrusted users on your system, you *need* that upgraded kernel package set.

Umm. Well, I'm the only person who ever uses my system and I hardly ever log in as root. I do connect at public wireless unencrypted networks like the public library. Would never cruise the Internet as the root user.

If it was important enough to patch this kernel why was it not important enough to release a kernel-modules-2.6.21.5_Slack12.0 ??? I assume that my system couldn't find its kernel-modules package because the names were slightly different. Am I correct?

Recompile madwifi? I got this as a precompiled package from a directory somewhere called alien. My track record in compiling from C sources is not wonderful. Example: programs from "Numerical Recipes in C" that compiled just fine in OS/2 with the gcc/emx C compiler and compiled just fine in Windoze98 with Borland's free command line c/c++ compiler routinely do not compile in Linux. I get tons of errors. My guess is that the compiler can't find its header files or that its C is not backwards compatible with Ansi C.

Anyway, for me the real solution is just to turn to Slackware 12.1 ... That should do it, don't you think?

The GNUinator

No. The recompiled kernel image itself is still compatible with the in-tree modules, so there's no need to recompile them. For out-of-tree modules (like madwifi), all bets are off.

That's Eric Hameleers -- alienBOB here on LQ, and alien at slackware.com. If he didn't push out a rebuild of the madwifi packages, then they still work with the new kernel too.

If that's the case, then I have no idea what happened on your system, but rest assured that it "just worked" for me and countless others.

Without seeing the 'tons of errors' there's no good way to answer that, but I suspect you're missing part of the d/ package series.

Yep, 12.1 should work fine too.