i am interested in upgrading to slackware 8.1 when it is released, but am curious regarding the problems following a full upgrade if there are any.
i have no intentions to uninstall my current installation and would just like to upgrade...has anyone had any experience with this or know of any problems and how to prevent them.
i currently run 8.0 if that even matters.

If you don't want to do a fresh install, I believe all you'll have to do is pull down the newer packages and upgrade them with pkgtool (or however you want to do it).

The main differences between distributions are the installation methods/scripts. All of the componets (i.e. programs, drivers, kernel, etc) are available outside of a distribution. So, theoretically, if you were staying current with the packages on your 8.0 system and had moved up to kernel 2.4.18, you would have Slack 8.1.

As far as an "upgrade" option, I'll defer to other folks here. I haven't seen that option in the 8.0 menus.

Avoiding any pitfalls is a matter of making sure your hardware will work ok with the software - since you're on 8.0 I'd say you're clear for that, and making sure any dependencies are satisfied with the software. That last bit will take a bit of digging on your part to find out what dependencies there are for packages you want to install.

I'm looking forward to 8.1 as well. If you run into any issues when you do move to it, post away and we'll help as we can.

j.

Its much nicer having a fresh install. As pkgtool doesnt keep track of dependancies, you might end up with crap left on the computer and/or unmet deps.

Why not just keep your /home and start afresh? once you know how to set up slack its not that big a deal to do a clean install and then type ./configure make and make install or installpkg about 20 times to install everything you need to.
All your program personal settings will be stored in the /home/user/.* files so they shouold be fine as long as you only mount /home during the install and dont initialise

Have a look at /slackware-8.1/UPGRADE.TXT

Ya, read that file that was mentioned above. If you are running a Slackware 8.1 RC then upgrading is very simple (just run upgradepkg *.tgz) in every directory of the slackware directory on the CD. Hell, I didn't even burn the iso, I just loop mounted it.

The big problem from going from 8.0 to 8.1 is the package names have changed in some cases, and you really need to upgrade pkgtools before you do anything else. So keep that in mind, the upgrade.txt or the changelog will tell you which packages have changed names and how to upgrade them when they have changed names.

I upgraded my system from 8.1RC1 to 8.1 Final this morning and it is working great.

I've just finished upgrading...only a few app to fix up.