I decided I wanted to try slackware-currents testing kernel 2.6.12.4 (i think) SO I downloaded everything and and ran upgradepkg * in that directory. Needless to say everything pretty much quit working after that

What a pita... I booted to a slackware 9.1 rescue cd (I couldn't find the 10.1 cd's) chroot'ed the system and and I couldn;t run mkinitrd to create a startup image file. I dont remember the error but I dont think you can run mkinitrd or lilo when you boot from a livecd. I tried a few other live cd's and couldnt get it to work.

anyways.. the fix was simple.. I used the 9.1 cd and reinstalled the default kernel and lilo. booted right up and installed the kernel correctly. I had done this many times before but I hadnt done it in a while and thought I remembered exactly how to do it.

so.. the moral is.. stop and think before you start to do it. My mistake cost me 10 minutes of downtime

*sigh* ooooooooook.

10 whole minutes, huh?

Gee, I wish my foul-ups only took me 10 minutes to fix.

The moral should be

"If you want something done right, do it yourself".

Try getting a vanilla kernel, and make your own config from scratch. Might take some time the first time, but you'll get to know it well enough to start from scratch at any time without such serious crashes.

If you want, this could help for a start
http://xushi.co.uk/guides/kernel.php

the moral of the story is this..........the proper way to upgrade all the package in a directory is.......

upgradepkg *.tgz

OH, I'll also mention that slackware v10.1 does NOT have a live rescue disk........since Pat V. did not take out gnome (like he said he would) there was not enough room on the disk to make it a live boot CD.......D'oh.........we should all complain so he'll get it right in v10.2

No, the moral of the story is something my manager told me right after I was hired into my first IT job:

Pillage first. Then burn.

Never forgot that in the many years of IT and usually saved me from doings that were detrimental.

By the way, HB!

My life would have been so much easier if someone had explained that to me when I was young.
echo "HB Trey."

First of all, at freakyg, either slack CD can be used as a rescue CD. Boot from CD1, log in as root, but instead of using setup, go straight to chroot. And if you've bothered to check the changelog, you'll see that gnome WAS removed from current, at the exact time he decided it should be.

Second, trey85stang, did you read the README from that kernel DIR ? Do you know that you have to load FS modules using an initrd if you're on certain file systems, as that is a generic kernel?

The lesson of the story is: know what you're doing. A simple upgradepkg *.tgz without looking into stuff can be dangerous.

Also, that kernel from /testing DOES work very well.

Alternatively, one could boot CD1 with the line:
boot: root=/dev/hdwhatever noinitrd ro
to boot their root partition as the root partition, as per the instructions on CD1.
I have NEVER been able to boot from CD2, don't know of anyone who has.
I believe Pat has already dropped Gnome for 10.2.

The moral:
Never eat soggy waffles.

Charred, Slackware 10.0 (and 9.1 too if my memory doesn't fail)'s CD 2 was booteable, it was more a rescue CD than CD 1, but that changed on 10.1, CD 2 is not a rescue cd anymore.

Sorry, I meant on 10.1; should have been more specific. I've booted CD2 of 9.1.

the moral should be ...

"never change the winning team"

if everything is running withouth problems, if there are no bugs/exploits which can endanger your system, why should you do an update/upgrade?

my slackware 10.1 on the laptops gets only gnome and kernel updates and that only if there are some improvments which can be usefull to me.

M.

Ummm...I still prefer the waffles one.

I've gone all -current in anticipation of 10.2.

Since gnome is no longer part of the distro, are there any suggestions on how best to remove it?

It is somewhat ironic, I think, that gdm is still the default login manager even though it's not in 10.2. I found that out while I was going through the '.new' rc files. I'll stick with kdm thank you.