I have a new(used) laptop to play with. Its about 3 years old so its not too out technology wise. 4GB 32 bit, 150GB HDD... so I put 14.1 got it configured and loaded xfce all under root level.

Then i decided to update the mirrors file to point to one of the "Current" sites. Got everything running did the update/upgrade and wham .... couldnt get X to run... forget the error so I went ahead and scrapped the install and re-installed 14.1 ... went through the configurations again but this time I pointed to the 14.1 repository. Did the update/upgrade and everything works fine....

I was bored, so I thought let me try this again... I re-installed 14.1 pointed to the "Current" repository and had the same problems I did to start off with. So I am wondering how much of a change is there between the "14.1" repository and the "Current" repository?

Note: on all my installs i take the default settings and load everything....

Anyone else experienced this? Kind of wierd behaviour... I am going to try this again this weekend but will see if I can just fix the X server issue that keeps cropping up from the updates from "Current"

K.

What are you using to update to current? If using slackpkg, are you running install-new, upgrade-all, and clean-system? If you don't clean the system of packages that have been removed, it may cause issues with the system.

It might be worth getting a -current ISO and try installing it instead of upgrading it. You can find unofficial ISOs on some mirrors (usually released about once a week) and there's a script out there (I think from alien_bob or rworkman) that will generate an ISO out of -current for you (although, I believe you have to download all the packages first, usually through rsync).

To upgrade to current you should select a current mirror and run:

However I don't know if that is a good thing to do when current is too far away from the stable release.

You can try creating the ISO yourself by mirroring the current branch using AlienBob's script

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Using the above-mentioned method is not the recommended way to upgrade from 14.1 to current, however, I can confirm that it will work. As moisespedro mentioned Alien Bob's mirro-slackware-current.sh script works very well indeed.

I always thought that was the "official way" when current and stable were close.

the above commands works, but still you need to read the ChangeLog for any important changes and check the difference of the configuration files

Ok, then I was not quite doing it right. I did

slackpkg update
slackpkg upgrade-all

could explain some things....I will give the suggested method a shot this weekend.

I will definitely check out Alien Bob's script, thanks all!

Also, when I go from 14.1 to -current I would add one command. You only need to do slackpkg update gpg once when you go from 14.1 to current. Also, slackpkg clean-system only needs to be run very sparingly. I would run that once when you go from 14.1 to -current. After that you don't need to run slackpkg clean-system very often.

# slackpkg update gpg
# slackpkg update
# slackpkg install-new
# slackpkg upgrade-all
# slackpkg clean-system

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Ooo yeah I only run the update gpg once... didnt think to run it when I went to the current repository... thanks !!

I couldnt wait for the weekend... re-installed the OS and got it up and running then went into mirrors and pointed to "Current" and ran the through the updates in the order mentioned... looks like that works Got Enlightenment installed and everything seems to be working. So for weekly maintenance I have set it up to run in the following order:

slackpkg update
slackpkg upgrade-all
slackpkg clean-system

This is just to keep everything up to date. Or do I need to include "install-new" as well?

k

if you are migrating from 14.1 to current, you definitely need slackpkg install-new

On slackware-current I would also definitely never schedule automatic upgrades. Slackware-current is our development, and you are essentially a beta tester now. It may break down before your eyes at the next update, like what happend with the glibc upgrade of last week.

Also, these commands you show are interactive, so they woun"t do a thing if you schedule them to run non-interactively.
And like Willy says, if you are on Slackware-current, you always need to run "slackpkg install-new" before running "slackpkg upgrade-all".

Note that "slackpkg clean-system" will remove all packages that are not part of Slackware - this includes every package which you install from a 3rd party repository. You'll need to use a blacklist to avoid that.

Eric

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Thanks Eric,

lol well being a beta tester is not bad... besides this particular laptop I was going to scrap anyways. I wanted to test something with Slackware and kind of got my answer... I may just keep it around and do more testing. The laptop seems to be humming right a long. Oh and yes, I definitely need to create a blacklist. I got everything all installed, configured, and started loading a couple of my favorite tools then did the refresh from current including clean-system... oops.... always a fun experience. As soon as my finger hit the enter key I realized what was going to happen. Not a big deal as I only had 2 packages to reinstall so it was fine.

Just out of curiousity anyone have a link to how to create a blacklist. This is something I havent had to do before...

/etc/slackpkg/blacklist is probably the file Alien Bob had in mind. See the comments in that file, and as you use slackpg, if not yet done read "man slackpkg" and "man slackpkg.conf". More information is available @ http://docs.slackware.com

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