in the next month or so i am thinking of upgrading the PC from intel to amd architecture. so a new mainboard and cpu (also a new grahpics card why the hell not!).

i dual boot with slack and winXP, and windows can be a fussy bugger when you change mainboard so i am going just going to backup and reinstall.

i have never done a major upgrade with lunix before. do i need to reinstall slackware, backing up all /etc/ /home and so on, or should it be ok with the necessary kernel changes before changing over?

any other advice is most welcome.

/dev/sda1/winxp
/dev/sda2/ 3rd party linux programs and files
/dev/hda2/main linux part

thanks

EEk....Depends. It MAY boot, but not very well. At the least, a kernel recompile with the proc, sound, chipset changes, etc will be neccesary. If you can do a new clean install, may STILL have same issues. The possible route to take is to compile the kernel BEFORE making the swap. Then shutdown, swap the parts, fire it up, and pray it boots ( I can't remember the last time a complete recompile worked exactly as I wanted it to on the first boot).

The main thing is how much hardware is changing. You maybe better off with a fresh install, because of starting with a fresh base, you have less of the extra stuff that the old setup had that can interfere with the new hardware.

What the heck. Try it. Try both ways. All it will cast is time. That is, as long as you don't toast your backups...(Yeah, I've NEVER done that!)

I recently (last week) transfered my 40g drive , win98 and slack 10.0 from my old old computer to this here newer old machine....hummm

Windows was the one doing the most complaining...had to reinstall, it kept getting that blue screen ; with slack all i had to do was to run xorgconfig and it was up and running ,it detected the integrated ethernet all by itself...no reinstall here ... good luck
P.S. Even if you had to reinstall...it is much simpler in Linux than Windows.

If you are running a stock Slackware kernel, you should have no problems other than perhaps redoing your X configuration.

If you are using a custom compiled kernel, you are likely going to have to redo most of it.

Pretty much what I was going to say earlier (but I had a date with a scotch).

Before you do the upgrade, backup /home and /etc (and any other places you have content), set your machine to boot one of the stock kernels, and set your default runlevel to 3 (or even 1). And backup.

Most stuff will probably work right away, it's not like you're changing CPU architectures - all the Slackware packages are system agnostic (or, rather, x86 agnostic). The only difficulty you might have is with software you have compiled yourself.

Case in point; recently I installed Slackware on a couple of laptops (AMD K6 and PIII, differnt brands/hardware) with busted CD drives (couldn't boot from CD). I was able to stick their HDDs in another laptop (AMD AthlonXP, again differnt brand & hardware) and do the install. Once the drives were returned to their homes, both worked. I have also done similar things with regular PC hardware - swapping drives between machines (while not exactly an 'upgrade', it's essentially the same). A little tweaking of xorg.conf here, a little tweaking of /etc/rc.d/rc.modules there....

I'm with cwwilson721 - try it. Let us know how it goes! I'm going to be doing the very same thing myself on one of mine as soon as I can scrape together the cash for a new mobo/cpu and graphics card, and I'm pretty confident.

Oh yeah, don't forget to backup

Tea and sympathy, my friend. We all have those bruises from kicking ourselves in the shins.

I recently had to move my slack to an older machine (new mobo just stopped working). I just installed the HD in the old machine as the primary drive (as it was before). I had to do some config file tweaking, mainly:

a) updated /etc/rc.d/rc.netdevice for my new (old) network card. Don't think this is created by default, but is called by the rc.inet? scripts. It contains a /sbin/modprobe line from rc.modules for my specific network card. I prefer using this file to updating /etc/rc.d/rc.modules, mainly because it isn't overwritten/ruled by updating kernel modules.

b) if you're loading any hardware-specific modules, update /etc/rc.d/rc.modules. A good example of this is your sound card.

c) If have on-board audio (and use it), you'll probably have to re-run alsaconfig, alsamixer and alsactl-store. (If you're just taking the old sound card from one system to another, I'm not sure if this is necessary. It can't hurt.)

c) I'm also not sure if this is necessary, but my understanding of linux (which is limitted) tells me that /etc/modprobe.conf contains hardware-specific information as well. At least I noticed some errors/messages on boot which didn't look right. I backed up that file and generated a new one using "generate-modprobe.conf > /etc/modprobe.conf"

Good luck. Fortune favours the bold.

Garry