Hello everyone,

I will shortly install slackware current and was wondering if there is a way to follow the updates to current easily.. i.e. can I just install updated packages over old ones, or is something more intricate required?

Cheers,
John

If you don't have experience with Linux (I have no idea if you do or not),
I would suggest you stay one release behind. The slackware-current is
bleeding edge, unstable, development type of stuff. It'll probably crash,
things won't work the way you expect. If you have experience with
Linux and you want to tinker, then by all means use slackware-current.
In order to keep up with the changes Patrick makes, I would suggest you
become a good friend of pkgtool and upgradepkg, download the new
packages into a directory, maybe /var/spool/packages, then use pkgtool
or upgradepkg to install the new SW.
I didn't see an rsync server on the get-slack page, so it may be a little
bit of work to keep up with the changes being made. . .

Slackware-current is actually fairly stable, as Peter doesn't usually include packages that aren't considered to be stable by the developers. I am currently running slackware-current on my home machine and the only package that isn't a full release version is aalib-1.4-rc5. Now if you go for packages in extra you might find some instability.

Peter? Who's Peter?

Cool

Oh he's just a guy associated with Patrick Volkerding, he goes by nickname Peter on LQ, lol

Oooh, you mean P-ee-t-e-rrr, oh yeah

Cool

Thanks for the help. I am experienced with linux (since 1997), but have mainly used debian up until now. I have been using slackware for 6 months and far prefer it.
Just one more question about updating slackware-current: is there a list somewhere that anounces when updates are made. slackware-announce doesn't seen to carry these...

Cheers,
John

To find out what has been updated in Slackware current go to one of the FTP mirror sites and check the changelog in the root directory of Slackware-Current. It will list the ongoing changes by day.

I would recommend not using an FTP connection to check the changelog since it will be taking up an FTP connection unnecessarily. . . check the link to the changelog on the Slackware website instead.

L8

Also note that it seems that some mirros are lacking behind a lot with the slackware-current. Atleast ftp.slackware.at seems to be fairly well up to date. (ftp.slackware.com is usually very slow so you probably want to use mirrors)

Yes always use mirrors. LNXMan, cool, somehow I never stumbled on that page before.

Personally since I have the space I have a cron job that rsyncs with carroll.aset.psu.edu in the middle of the night EST, pretty zippy on non-prime time. Then I just check my local copy.

Hey John,

I have a mail-out that notifies of changes to slackware-current.

Take a look on http://www.userlocal.com/
Look at the left lower box on the page for details of how to subscribe.

mRgOBLIN