Upgrade to Slackware -current without a -current CD
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
By truthfatal at 2006-09-12 22:52
I’m quite sure that everyone who does this has their own method. This is the method that worked for me. I go about things like ths because I’m far to cheap and lazy to install a CD burner on my machine. If I did that I would just burn a -current ISO and install. I don’t use tools like slapt-get, swaret, or slackpkg, because I don’t want to. I have in the past used the method described in Slackware’s UPGRADE.txt, and that’s probably what I’ll do when Slack 11 is finally released, but I wanted a clean -current install, with no residual Slack 10.2 left in my system.
The first things you’ll need are a working slack install, a separate partition that’s big enough to hold the slackware-current packages, and Alien’s “rsync_current.sh” script.
Step one:
Mount a partition to hold your slackware-current, I keep mine at /root/backup
Step two:
Read that shell script you downloaded from Alien you might want to edit it to make sure it downloads to the right partition/folder (for me that's /root/backup/Slackware/ on /dev/hda3), that rsync is excluding the folders you don’t want, and that it uses a mirror close to you.
Step three:
Log in as (or `su` to) root, and run the script.
Step four:
By now you should have a bunch of packages on a separate partition, a perfectly good working slackware installation, and a slight uneasy feeling in your gut that you may be about to bork your system. Good for you! Things are proceeding well :)
This is probably the most important step in any major system change. Back up your information
Easy as that, back it up. Anything that you’ve customised, tweaked, created, downloaded and want to use in the future. Back it up. Now.
Step five:
Time to start the install! Grab your installation CD stick it in your machine and reboot the computer. Go through the steps until you get to the install disks shell prompt. Before you run ’setup’ you’ll need to mount the partition that has slackware-current in it. in my case, I make a directory called current ‘mkdir current’ and ‘mount /dev/hda3 ./current”
Step six:
run ’setup’ and start the install process. when it comes time to choose your target directories whatever you do, do not try to format the partition containing slackware-current.
Step seven:
At some point, the installation will ask for an install source. You will choose to install from an already mounted partition. Following my examples, the directory you would type is ”/current/Slackware/slackware-current/slackware/”. Do it, and the magic happen!
Step eight:
After that it should be business as usual. I ran into some problems installing a kernel with setup because I didn't rsync the "/slackware-current/kernels/" dierctory, so I skipped that step and used the test26.s kernel for a while until I compiled a new one out of the 2.6.16.27 source in the current/extra directory.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.