Upgrading over network?
 

I've got a laptop with Slackware 10.2 installed, and I'm interested in upgrading to 11. The only problem is, there are hardly any sites with ISO images to download. (I know, I could download an ISO image via a torrent. I may do that, but my work blocks torrents and I don't really have the time to fiddle with that at home. Well, I could *make* time, but I'd prefer not to unless it's necessary. Anyway . . .)

So, I was wondering how one goes about upgrading Slackware over the network. Is there an easy, slick way to do this? Or will I have to download each package directory by hand or something?

Thanks in advance.

Doug

http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-11.0-iso/ has all the ISOS and a very fat pipe.

Eric

Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately, all I see are .asc and .md5 files.

Actually, though, I was able to download the iso files from a different source, after I read through the 11.0 announce thread, which I probably should have done in the first place. :-)

I'm still curious, though. Is there a good way to upgrade Slackware without downloading the iso files? Maybe a way to find out which packages have been modified and update them across the network?

Doug

You were right... hm. This mirror (also very fast) has them all: http://slackware.mirrors.tds.net/pub...ware-11.0-iso/

As a test, I used slackpkg (from the /extra directory) for an upgrade over the network. And that worked out pretty well (I did not need that many packages because I was running a version of slackware-current that was a month old).

Eric

So how did you do it? Did you just download the package and upgrade or was there something more to it?

Doug

I installed slackpkg from the /extra directory of Slackware 11.0 (you can download it from any Slackware mirrorif you don't have Slackware 11.0 CDROM or DVD media, it's basically a bunch of scripts).

Then, I uncommented one of the Slackware http mirrors from the slackpkg configuration and ran to let it build the list of available packages, and then ran to bring my system up to date.

This prompted several issues that I had to resolve - some of them could be resolved by telling slackpkg what to do, like dealing with the presence of more than one package of the same name on my computer. For instance multiple kernels, and multiple versions of wireless drivers that I had installed for all those kernels. Other issues are left for you to deal with after slackpkg ends (like veryfying a lot of changed scripts that are left as <filename>.new on your computer) and manually installing kernel-modules and updating lilo.conf / running lilo. Slackpkg informed me about most of these issues, so with some carefully executed steps, there was no problem resolving all of those.

I must say, I concluded that this upgrade process is not for the "Slackware illiterate" - you do have to know what you're dealing with here. If I have to compare the upgrade through slackpkg with my usual process of re-install from scratch while preserving the content of my current /home partition, I feel more comfortable with re-installing from scratch. But that is my personal opinion based on a single run of slackpkg, don't let it influence your own thoughts about it too much.

Eric

Hi,

Go here to get the iso(s)!

Edit: sorry eric, I'm having some network problems and did not get the full thread. Will have to find out what's going on!

Cool! I'll have to play with that next time I upgrade. (Right now, my little Libretto 70CT is chugging away on the install CDs that I finally managed to download.)

Thanks for your help.

Doug