Dear all,
I have slackware 13 64 that comes with Firefox 3.5.2. Since I have this habit of updating the latest version of Firefox, I installed 3.6.3 that I had grabbed from current. Alas, whatever the reason was, the software wasn't installed correctly; so I moved back to 3.5.2.

Question:
1. Is it wise to upgrade the latest version of Firefox in Linux Slackware.
2. If yes, what is the best way to do it?

regards,
ethereal1m

Take a look at the command slackpkg. It is the official way to upgrade packages.

slackpkg update
slackpkg install-new
slackpkg upgrade-all

are the basic command that will get you going, but as with all software that you are unfamiliar with read the man page. I would also recommend reading the changelog in case a package has been removed. You will probably also want to edit /etc/slackpkg/slackpkg.conf mirrors and blacklist.

Also don't mix stable and current unless you know what you are doing, and if you do, try running current instead, it is, in my opinion, quite a bit faster.

samac

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1. Yes.
2. Download from the Slackware 13 mirror. I use slackpkg, but the manual way is to check the security updates here.

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BTW you can also join the slackware-security mailing list.

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what do you mean by don't mix current and stable? Are you talking just the kernel only or the whole installation or something else?

I have 13.0 stable installation but I upgraded mysql, apache, and php to current. Is this a bad thing?

The whole thing. You may get away with it but mixing any packages from current with stable is not recomended and may cause problems.

It's usually safer to get the source and Slackbuild from the current tree and rebuild the package on a stable system if you really need the updated version. Libraries and other things can change causing problems mixing versions so it's generally not recommended.

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Packages for each release are compiled against the system libraries for that release. If the libraries are the same there won't be a problem. If not there might be..

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I just compile my own, that way it's always up-to-date as long as they post the code, and it'll be slightly faster because I optimize it.

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The simplest way to upgrade is to go to your favorite Slackware mirror and grab the packages from the /patches/packages directory for your version of Slackware. Then run upgradepkg *.txz (for version 13 and above). That way you're sure to have the most up-to-date packages for your version of Slackware.

In other words, there's no reason to grab packages from -current to upgrade -stable. Stable gets updated whenever there's a need to do so.

Slackpkg does a great job of automating this process. But, it is still a good idea to read the changelog to learn what is being updated and why. If you click on the link above you'll see that Firefox was most recently upgraded for -stable on April 5th.

Regards,

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ok, thanks for clearing things up guys...