I am sure all of us has at one time or another wished that the package manager would install and update things. I have had issues since College Linux 2.5 use an old linux kernel. This kernel does not properly access hard drives. So when watching my anime videos on the pc it would pause a second every few seconds. Well I was tooling around with the system and discovered something that may help you guys out a bit.

College Linux 2.5 uses slapt-get as a package manager. This is quite a powerful program. But for some reason the developers at CL has set it so that the kernel and key items won't be updated. And if they do not include an updated version of some software on their server slapt-get will not even work to fetch it.

So first off using your root access open /etc/slapt-getrc in any file editor you wish. If you would like and updated kernel and so forth, there is a line that starts with EXCLUDE= put a # in front of that or if you just want a few of those things listed excluded delete what you want from the list.

Next is a bunch of lists. Everything has a # in front of it except the college linux site. Now CL uses Slack-ware 9.1 so you would be safe removing the # from in front of anything with 9.1 at the end. Now I am not making any suggestions of using the current version updates. I am not sure what will happen. But the more sources you have the greater amounts of updates. but the longer it will take to get an update. So maybe it would be best to select a few choice sites you know. Oh some sites wont work either. Like tucows.

Now you get to do the fun part of updating. The gui package does not really work that well. So open up a terminal. Type slapt-get --update. This will connect to the server an update your files list. Then if you want to straight up upgrade all the files on your list type slapt-get --upgrade. This will automatically upgrade everything to the newest version and delete out the old versions. The neat thing of slapt-get is that it will install any dependencies a program has.

If you have chosen to upgrade your kernel and the such..... you will need to run the command lilo. This will update your lilo so you will boot with the new kernel. Now after updating my kernel I lost my sound drivers for some mysterious reason. I spent 2 days searching the net trying to figure out what happened. Finally on a whim I ran kudzu. Which identified my soundcard and set everything right.

You know now that I am updated my computer wails. I mean peanut linux was fast and now CL is competing... boot ups and everything is faster.


Thats it for now. Anyone have suggestions or comments. Maybe the CL guys could tell me why this is a bad thing. Thanks for suffering through my bad grammar.

Harold

Interesting

I may try slapt-get one of these days on Slackware. I wonder if swaret works on College Linux.