my slackware 14.0 dvds are beginning to collect dust already... time flies!
edit: After running 13.37 with no problems and doing nearly nothing for more than a year, I was scared to upgrade! But I did it! The upgrade process using slackpkg from a local mirror on my hard drive, and using my own script to upgrade the *-compat32-* packages went rather well. I guess I was prepared and the software packages were nice enough not to break when upgraded. Very nice!
This is what I did, more or less:
*) Compiled the new kernel on 13.37 to make sure I could compile it; I configured it with everything I use as builtin as much as possible. This took some time because I had to start with generic .config and go through "make menuconfig" very carefully, setting everything I want as before in 13.37 to y <*>.
*) Upgraded glibc*, slackpkg, and pkgtools.
*) slackpkg clean-system
*) slackpkg install-new
*) slackpkg upgrade-all
*) downloaded the 14.0 multilib gcc*, glibc*, and compat32-tools and upgraded to them
*) ran "telinit u" to restart init on the multilib glibc
*) ran a script of mine that upgraded each *-compat32-* package to the new available versions in the slackware 32-bit mirror packages sets; it runs convertpkg-compat32 on them and upgrades them etc. I was surprised to see a new "repo" tag naming like Xcompat32.txz, but was able to manange with that change to the package names.
*) ran "make" on the kernel source again so it would fully recompile under the newly installed/upgraded gcc; then, installed the kernel
*) setup lilo with the new kernel image (no initrd needed right now), and made entry to boot old 13.37 kernel in case of emergency (but didn't have to); ran lilo
*) uninstalled the old nvidia blob with the .run file's --uninstall option
*) rebooted (scary part, but rebooted okay)
*) installed nvidia blob 295.75 because 30x versions don't use my twinview xorg.conf setup 100% correctly
*) uninstalled old alsa-driver; downloaded alsa-driver 1.0.25 and built package: alsa-driver-1.0.25_3.2.29-x86_64-1root.txz and installed it.... I have my kernel configured with no alsa at all, and just modular base oss support which I do not currently use... alsa-driver in the kernel itself is sometimes an older version, so I don't build the in-kernel alsa-driver
*) did some misc other cleanup, like deleting some old /usr/src/linux-<old versions> and /lib/modules/<old versions>, remove junk in the root "/" directory; check that all "Added" packages got added by install-new, and check that all "Removed" packages were gone by "clean-system"... had to becareful with slackpkg clean-system to not remove SBo and compat32 packages, but to upgrade them later/differently.
*) rebooted again
*) uninstalled old QtCurve-Gtk/KDE stuff
*) installed oxygen-gtk3 and set symlink: cd ~/.conf; ln -s /usr/share/themes/oxygen-gtk/gtk-3.0 gtk-3.0
*) rebuilt/reinstalled package gtk-qt-engine (this took a little hacking on the include.patch and SlackBuild for that) and later used it to set oxygen-gtk2 theme in ~/.gtk-2.0.
*) started ktorrent, which got upgraded, and it worked just fine
*) ran an old 32-bit game: wolfsp.... worked fine.
*) ran audacious, which is now a gtk3+ app, and looks fine with KDE oxygen gui style.
*) downloaded libvdpau-0.5 and it's slackbuild and installed it... needed this to get the development header files for vdpau
*) downloaded the source and slackbuild for MPlayer and rebuilt it so it would detect and enable vdpau.
Okay, something like that! Not too bad. I'll probably find a few other minor things I have to fix up, but nothing failed really.
Thanks a lot to the Slackware team for testing that all these new packages and kernel will actually work smooth on upgrade! This kind of upgrade could easily have turned into a nightmare, but didn't with slackware 13.37 -> 14.0!
