what's the best upgrade/package upgrade software to use for someone learning linux? it seems there are so many (ie. swaret, slapt-get, etc). what do you guys suggest or use yourself?

i would go with swaret it has a nice gui frontend in the form of qtswaret.

A little warning. If you opt to use a script to upgrade packages on Slackware, ALWAYS read the changelog for the version you are using before you bother running the script. Pat will state if you need to edit an option in a config file that will cause errors with upgraded packages. Now, as a package upgrade program, the one I usually reference to others is slackpkg since you will know what packages are being upgraded (it requires you to specify the package to upgrade). And besides (the last I checked) it was the only one that Pat included in the extras/ folder on CD2.

guys, i decided to upgrade my whole system and when i rebooted, it was using the 2.4.* kernel (i was on 2.6.13 prevously) and my xwindows didn't come up (i think i need to make a new xorg.conf). what happened? how do i avoid this next time, and how do i get back on 2.6? it's like it un-did all the configuring i did before!

Using Swaret like someone suggested and whose advice you seem to have followed, is not an assurance for keeping your Slackware system running. Swaret is a 3rd party tool and while it tries to be intelligent about what packages to upgrade, you yourself still are the master of the box. Slackware package management is very basic, and assumes you check the update process - like, changing configuration files and such. The Slackware package manager, "pkgtool" is something you should at least look at to see what it does and what it does not, before you start using a 3rd party tool.

If you want to learn Linux using Slackware, you should start learning Slackware too. The results of your upgrade indicate that this is really a necessary step. The Slackware 10.2 UPGRADE.txt will tell you why X refused to start for instance (because you went from XFree86 to XOrg) and will also tell you what to change to make X work again; and the rest of the UPGRADE.txt text will be quite useful when you are determining what other files to update apart from /etc/X11/xorg.conf (or /etc/X11/XF86Config if you still have that).

Good luck with learning more about your Slackware computer.

Eric

I know upgrade.txt talks about going from 10.1 to 10.2. Could I use the same instructions to go from 10.0 to 10.2? Or, should I really have 10.1 before doing the upgrade to 10.2? Thanks.