upgrade from 13.37
 

Hi all,

Getting excited about the imminent release...

If I remember, in the past it was recommended to do progressive upgrades and not skip a version. I usually use slackpkg to upgrade. Assuming I do slackpkg clean-system at the end, is there any reason not to upgrade directly to 14.1 from 13.37?

Brian

I tried it just recently on a system and started getting errors not very long into the install. Don't remember what the error was, something about ild or ld not for sure what it was. I used the option to download all files before installing. On the second try, I followed the upgrade to 14 text to upgrade from 13.37 to current and still got same error.

@colorpurple - So you got the errors even though you did incremental upgrades? Did the upgrade ever complete?

@Habitual - I couldn't find in the link where he addresses my questions

Brian

I had 13.7 on vmware and tried to do an upgrade straight to current, skipping 14 with slackpkg update, slackpkg installnew, slackpkg upgradeall. walked away while it was downloading everthing, came back and was getting errors during the installs. Then tried it again 13.37 to current skipping 14, but following the upgrade.txt that was provided to upgrade to 14. Still got the errors. Now I think about it I was tired so I might have missed one of the preliminary installs before installing everything else, but not sure.

I wrote a blog how to upgrade from early version to current, check it out, beware, you will missing some libraries, which you have to manually download from L directory and install these libraries.

Basically, need upgrade kernel first, then you wouldn't get old kernel panic problem, then you need manually build and upgrade lilo, mkinitrd, so you can use new kernel.

I wrote the blog for 64bit, making changes the directory if you are using 32bit. (note: you might need to rebuild udev package after full upgrade.)

Good luck.

13.37 to 14.0 was some huge changes in kde etc etc. if you upgrade from slackpkg I always do an install-new first then upgrade all.
but if you did it from UPGRADE.TXT it should be ok. this little script has helped me many times when working with current and rolling back to a earlier version

FYI, using slackpkg for upgrades will only work if you upgrade to the next release and do not skip a release.

When you run "slackpkg install-new" in order to install packages which have been added to Slackware since the previous release, slackpkg will check the ChangeLog.txt of that release for lines that have the string "Added." in them. If you skip a release, then any package that was added to Slackware in that skipped release, will not get installed on your computer. That is a recipe for disaster.

If you want to skip one or more releases, you will have to do so manually, using the instructions from UPGRADE.TXT of your new Slackware release as well as the UPGRADE.TXT files of the skipped release(s).
But you might consider doing a full re-install from scratch instead.

Eric

Played around with it last night on vmware. I got it to install with upgrading kernels, lilo, rerunning lilo and rebooting to use new kernels before installing a/glibc-solibs. Installed everything else without error. When I went to reboot started to get errors about modprobe.d and wasn't able to reconnect to internet. I only had a, ap, l, n installed. I suspect the problems was caused by the install-new issues mentioned by Alien Bob

@Alien Bob
Thanks for the description of the pitfall in post #8.
Perhaps this could be made more explicit in your article at SlackDocs. http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:sla...:systemupgrade
This is going to get a heavy workout in the near future.

That's exactly what I wanted to know. Makes perfect sense.

Thanks, Brian

PS And thanks to everyone else who took the time to reply.

I wrote a script that compares available package files with installed packages rather than trying to parse the Changelog like slackpkg does but it only works with packages stored on your local filesystem, so you'd need a local mirror of the slackware packages to use it. Works really well for me, but I know not everyone likes to keep a local mirror (which IMO is short-sighted as it's a handful of GB well spent and has saved my bacon numerous times).

You mean something like this?

Note: I am assuming bash and that PACKAGES.TXT is in the current working directory.

You could also pipe the result of that through "grep '^>'" to see a list of just the non-official packages you have installed or "grep '^<'" just to see the official packages you are missing.

Not exactly, it was a bit more involved than that and allows for multiple package sources without reading any meta-data files.

I posted this once before, but nobody seemed interested.


P.S.

I usually use it like this (though this doesn't cater for any ordering requirements):