Well, the time has come folks. I haven't been sleeping well this past two nights. I've napped twice today to make up for last night's lack of sleep. That means, I'll probably be up all night tonight just because of the excellent naps I've had today. If I'm going to be up all night, I may as well be doing something constructive.

Tonight's project will be an "in situ" upgrade of ericesbane06's recent fresh install of Slackware64 14.2 to the most recent release version Slackware64 15.0. You less experienced kids should not attempt this at home. I'm an old Slacker veteran. I've done this before a few times. Should be fun. Uh-huh.

I have already backed up the important stuff like /home/<user> and /etc. I actually have a full rsync backup of the current working operating system (14.2) that will be getting the upgrade. The worst that can happen is that I nuke the entire set up and have to start from scratch (fresh install of 15.0). I've been there, done that few times in the last 18 years, too.

So, fair warning... if you don't see/hear from me in the next couple days, you'll know my system is hosed and I'm resting before attempting a fresh start. If all does go well, then I'll probably be back online posting about it before tomorrow morning. Alrighty, then... fingers/toes crossed, lock & load, pucker up that anus... We're goin' in...

What could possibly go wrong?


Image of Godzilla destroying Tokyo


Godzilla from Spectres (1977) - Blue Oyster Cult

If you've already backed up /home, why bother going through an upgrade?

Fresh install & copy back old configs where necessary. That's what I'd do.

But I'm not you. You can w̶a̶s̶t̶e̶ spend your time however you choose... but if you want it to be a painless exercise, read this in its entirety first: https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackw....0/UPGRADE.TXT

The UPGRADE.TXT is how I did it. I don't do fresh installs if I can avoid it because that involves too much work because of all my extra software and customizations.

Anyway, a couple minor blips here and there, but managed to get the upgraded Slackware to boot. I'm currently updating software (kernel included), and checking this and that to see if all came through OK.

There will be some more work tomorrow to put the last polishing touches on everything, but that should be relatively easy-peasy.

Well, that was fun. Now, I remember why I had been putting off doing it.

It's 0343hrs EST, so I'm going to beddy-bye now. I'll work on polishing up a few little odds and ends on this nice newly upgraded Slackware64-15.0 tomorrow some time. G'night all...

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A few weeks back I have upgraded my VPS @ Linode from 14.2 to 15.0. I could not follow UPGRADE.TXT to the letter because this system is a stripped down Slackware: no X, no desktop, etc. so not really a piece of cake, but it succeeded. About backup: done using Linode tools (back up of the virtual drive).

Now I am going to upgrade my Ubuntu in a Qemu VM from 23.04 to 23.10. As the virtual drive is qcow2 formatted, backing up is done instantly:If something go wrong I will just restore the snapshot like thiswhich will take less than 5 seconds.

> which will take less than 5 seconds.

Ah... love those fast ones.

OK, then...

This morning I:

- upgraded the kernel to 5.15.145 (security upgrade).
- took care of all my /etc/*.new files
- removed old/obsolete baloney from the system
- updated via slackpkg (not kernel - did that manually)


All seems to be OK. I'm having a minor issue that I will resolve shortly:

- reboot and shutdown (telinit 6 & 0) are not working properly... hang at the end and neither reboot nor shutdown occurs. I'll figure it out. I'm sure it's something simple.

In a while, I'll be doing some polishing/customizing of the Xfce interface. There are a few things I knew were coming (and didn't look forward to) with 4.16. That's part of the reason I delayed so long in my upgrading to 15. Anyway, I'll tinker around with things a bit. I already figure how to use Pango markup to enhance the boring and drab Xfce panel clock a bit.

Off I go...

Oh, and can't forget this...

Once again, THANK YOU, @Pat Volkerding, @Eric Hameleers, @Robby Workman, et al.

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