AND the replacement of udev (etc) by uedev, as to stay clear of a certain init system.

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Yes, but those changes went mostly unnoticed by users which is why I didn't mention them.

(And it could be argued that pulseaudio went unnoticed by most users due to Pat using sane defaults, but there were plenty of people who did notice who were very vocal about the change... both positive and negative.)

Although it was the major reason why 14.2 was released so much later then 14.1, internally a lot of things changed.
The pulseaudio one was - for me - a lesser change as I was already used to it from openSUSE and CentOS, which I had to maintain for all Linux users at my job. When 14.2 got released I was already retired and thus back to Slackware on my home system.

I was brought here by a search. I haven't used Slackware in several years, mostly using various *buntus for a long while, editing videos, and I haven't been doing any exploring with what the community has been up to. So I thought I'd do some searches 14.2 was released a long time ago. Vector Linux seems dormant at best. SLAX is now Debian-based. (WHAT THE...??? When did THAT happen?) and so I really wanted to know if Slackware is dead. Happy to see that it's not. And I appreciate finding a thread from this year. It's reassuring.

blackbelt_jones I think you would greatly enjoy LiveSlak... basically -Current on a stick. It's pretty great and there are several DE flavors to choose from..

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Obviously there is a lot of development going on in the Slackware community, and it is not dead. Great.

However ...

I have two slackware64-14.2 systems and would really like to have upgrades of a number of packages, list too long and probably too specific to me to be worth spelling out. I am not an experimenter and don't follow all the good things that alien-bob and others provide (although I've installed a few); I just want a more up-to-date slackware64. In the past I have always simply slackpackaged every new release in full as it shows up. Now none shows up.

Just supposing (**not** assuming) that no new release will ever show up - what is the recommended keep-it-current process? Please be specific - e.g. "use current" is not a helpful answer - how would I do that - how often? what testing etc etc

I.e. what should I do? (Facetious answers are fine in keeping with this channel).

John Lumby

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I stuck it out on 14.2 for a long as I could but it got to where packages I used just would not build on it and I wanted some of the new stuff in that software, also just was getting kind of bored. So what I started doing is just "upgrading to current" periodically. I also watch the change log for security related packages and sometimes patch in a single package if other core stuff has not been rebuilt lately and it seems safe to do so.

This is pretty much what you need to do.
1) Rsync the slackwaret64-current tree
2) review UPGRADE.txt - it does not get updated but its a good procedure to follow
2a) review the change log since you last updated, you need to replace the added and removed packages lists in the upgrade procedure with this information. Its usually a trivial matter of using egrep to get the data you need.
3) do the upgrade

Now what I would strongly suggest is moving to a btrfs subvolume for your root file system and your home directory. This way you can create snapshots and rolling back if something does not work is as easily adding a line or two the configs for lilo or elilo

Many thanks Chemfire - very helpful, I'll give it a try

I would also recommend reading the CHANGES_AND_HINTS.txt file, although, it hasn't been updated since the inclusion of PAM. It will definitely get done before the release if not several times before the release.

I've been multi-booting since around 1992 so it has been common for me to have considerable drive space and several parallel OpSys on the ready. By using a 3rd Party bootloader that could hide partitions on-the-fly I even have 3 different DOS versions, MSDOS, PCDOS, and DRDOS on the sdame machine to compare features and sometimes to experiment how much was "translatable". By 1998 when I first installed Mandrake Linux alongside Win 3.11, Win95 and OS/2 Warp 4, I soon borked the entire Mandrake system with an automated system upgrade so I began installing lots of Linux distros, sometimes learning and borrowing from one to improve another. At one time I had nine different OpSys installs on one box.

Then I pared down to five. For quite some time 14.0 Slackware was my Main because I resisted the move to 14.2 (I didn't see 14.1 as enough different to warrant an "upgrade") because I didn't want Pulseaudio in my Main. So after awhile I made two parallel installs of 14.2, one with Pulse, and another where I stripped it away to experiment with and once Current introduced PureALSA I managed to adapt it to 14.2 and it replaced 14.0 as my Main. My pleasure with Current caused me to want to keep up with what's happening in Current so I began to install snapshots while resisting routine system upgrades. If the Changelog revealed things that seemed especially useful I just wiped the old snapsot and installed the new one since I could always fall back to my Main, 14.2.

In the past several months -Current has won me over, especially with Plasma 5 KTown, and I rarely boot 14.2 but it is still where my main LILO bootloader resides. In the next couple weeks that will change as I'm building a new PC and I plan to have just 3 OpSys with -Current as my Main, incorporating anything I wish to keep from 14.2. Backup images make that pretty trivial.

Please forgive all this "lead in" but I hope it can serve a purpose for some Slackers. It really isn't hard to have parallel installs that allow you to have a dependable Main and one or several "toying" installs. If you don't mind wholesale automated upgrades but you worry about breakage, first of all breakage is pretty rare with Current but you can drop that incidence to zero while still "keeping up" by having one "snapshot" -Current install and another routinely upgraded install, even while you still have all your stuff on 14.2. Then, once you hit a sweet spot, you will likely settle on a snapshot as your Main and you can easily move over all your stuff when you feel comfortable.

Bottom Line - You can set your system up to evolve while always keeping a stable Main.

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I wonder! I have a lot of unpartitioned disk space. Maybe I should do a current install and use that as my main system, with 14.2 as a fallback in case something breaks. Only I don't really like having multiple systems to upgrade in case I run out of bandwidth.

Hello hazel

I don't have your bandwidth concerns but I do have an aversion to wholesale upgrades, so I don't do even -Current with either rsync or anything like slackpkg. My Main currently (pun definitely intended ) is a snapshot of the end of May ~Current with KTown substituted for KDE4. As I've stated elsewhere, I consider both that snapshot of Slackware and KTown to be as solid (actually more solid) as Slackware and KDE4 were when first combined Officially. The only common upgrades for me are kernels and graphics drivers and I could easily get by for long periods without those.

Chemfire, did you mean that rsync command literally?

I tried

rsync -avz mirrors.slackware.com:/slackware/slackware64-current/slackware64 /mnt/july01/downloads/slackware64-current/slackware64

but as I rather expected rsync could not connect (tried to use ssh)

wget -r --no-parent https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackw...t/slackware64/

seems to be working fine though - just curious how you used rsync (if you did)

John

According to me Slackware is like a phoenix, good, solid and alive. I'm not expert but to my need it work very well.

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I'd recommend Alien Bob's mirror-slackware-current.sh to mirror the Slackware64-current tree. I use it to mirror Slackware64-current, Slaclware-current and Slackware64-14.2. The first is updated daily via a cron job. The other two are manually as needed. It also can build build an ISO.

You can get it here: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/ Look for "Some useful scripts..."

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