I have slackware 10.0 (not 10.2) currently using the 2.4 kernel that came with it. I am thinking of upgrading to slackware 11 (and also intending to use a 2.6 kernel and udev). Because I have dialup I will most likely order the CDs from someplace.

Which is better: delete everything and reinstall from scratch or instead use upgradpkg to install/upgrade everything on the CDs into the existing linux?

I think going by the amount of changes from 10 to 11 there will be means you're better off reinstalling from scratch.

There have been plenty of changes in the distro, including the shift from XFree86 (which was in 10) to Xorg and also udev.

There are also changes in the core distribution packages which might affect your system if you try and manually change everything if something goes wrong.

I would make backups of /home and /etc and then re-format the PC. Starting over from scratch will not cost you significantly more time... because after an upgrade you'll have to start looking for ".new" configuration files, abandoned libraries, missing packages, and probably end up with an unstable system anyway.

If you do not have it already, create a separate partition for your /home which will make future upgrades/reinstalls a lot easier. If you already have a separate partition for /home then you can do a re-install of Slackware, telling the setup program not to re-format that partition! Write down in advance what your partition layout is and then boot the PC with the Slackware CDROM (use "fdisk -l" output), so that you know what partition contains /home when the question is asked by setup.

Eric

Start anew. As Eric suggested, I've got a separate /home, /boot, and /mp3s partitions so I don't have to reformat those bits for a new OS. I know it's possible to upgrade, but I think the nuke and reinstall method is a bit more foolproof.

Likely I would format and reinstall from scratch ... wait ... I already did that! It's the safest route

My first version of Slackware was 10.0. after which I upgraded to 10.1 and then 10.2... always following Pat's instructions in UPGRADE.TXT, never had a problem. Until now I've found that to be very useful and informative - but I have never upgraded from one major version to another.

Is upgrading from 10.2 to 11.0, without re-installing from scratch, really going to be troublesome? Has anybody really tried it?

I have 10.2 installed and I am downloading 11. I am making some backups of /home and I will install 11 from scratch.

There has been a lot of changes in Slackware 11 and if you take a look at the forums, people that upgraded from 10.x to 11 are having a lot of problems.

Well, I (and I know more people) went always with -current and don't have problems. I've used UPGRADE.txt instructions before without problems too. You just have to read carefully...

I wonder why a bit experienced Slacker would bother to reinstall from scratch
I've updated boxes from 10.2 to 11.0 without a hitch as I've did many times before. Upgrading glibc-solibs, pkgtools and sed first then other packages does the job. To solve new dependencies some new packages have to be installed (they are marked REQUIRED in tagfiles btw.).
I mostly do many changes in configuration files in /etc tree so I need to check diffs with .new versions anyway.

I updated from 10.2 to 11 using slackpkg without an issue. There are some manual tweaks to do after you run slackpkg upgrade-all though.

My suggestion - if you don't have an extra partition, use QParted or something like it to create one, install Slack 11 from the CD/DVD on that new partition (maybe even sharing your independent /home partition) and keep what you have totally in tact. That way you can play around until you're ready to make the switch. The whole configuration of Slack is getting old, especially when I am experiencing the fun of PC-BSD at the same time.
I think everyone should check that out and learn some BSD for a change. I don't have a single complaint about it yet but in just two hours I have accumulated several small annoyances about Slack 11. But I'm sure in time I will love 11 just as much.

I have upgraded two different model laptops and a desktop from 10.2 to 11.0 with UPGRADE.TXT. Things went very smoothly. Having carefully backed up /etc, I cavalierly mv'ed all the conf.new's to .confs. Again no problem. Then customized the configurations as needed, which I would have had to do anyway.

Only thing that irritated me was that running upgradepkg/*/*tgz causes the deletion of all the modules for your current kernel. It's not really a problem, since kernel-generic (I use 2.6.17) boots fine, but it does make you gulp. So I now move the kernel pkgs out of the tree and upgrade those seperately using "installpkg" instead.

But really, go ahead and try it first. You can always go the fresh install method later if you find that UPGRADE.TXT caused you problems. I was actually wondering what the advantage of reinstall and reformatting was. Is there a speed advantage to reformatting (I use reiserfs)?

Brian

I have machines that started life as 9.0
They have a lot of orphan packages on them - mainly from the dropping of Gnome.
I have not found an easy way o identifying these.
On major upgrades, like 11.0, I find that I need to run swaret --dep to find the odd extra library that i have missed adding.

A way of finding orphan packages is grepping "Removed. ", "Moved to /" and "Moved from /" from the ChangeLog.txt on every upgrade. They're listed on UPGRADE.TXT too. Also, in 11 there's a file called CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT which shows a difference of packages.

Orphaned packages may be also identified by slackpkg tool (to be found in extra/). Read about clean-system command in the documentation.