I'm a newbie to Slackware and still unsure on a couple of things. The first being on how to patch my box and how to keep my settings intact.

I've got Slackware 10.2 installed an plan to update. My questions being, 1)Do I look at the -current change log or the -stable(10.2) log? 2)When updating software do I use 'upgradepkg *.tgz' or 'upgradepkg blah.tgz%blah2.tgz', I'm unsure on which command to use, do I have to scroll through all my packages and write down package names? 3)Assuming I'm using the -stable(10.2) change log I'm starting from :

Sun Sep 25 22:03:45 PDT 2005

So do I just work my way up, updating everything? and which config files do you recommend me to keep/backup, what packages do I have to watch out for? I've installed Slackware several times due to messing up my system, I don't want to mess it up this time...please, can someone help me.

search www.linuxpackages.net for 'slackupdate'

Read the 10.2 (stable) changelog. Patches/security updates are kept on the Slackware ftp site at:

ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackwar...tches/packages

You can pick through the ones you want to download, save them to a directory and run upgradepkg *.tgz in that directory to update the lot.

Alternatively, grab all the .tgz's - running upgradepkg *.tgz will only upgrade packages that are actually installed.

Running anything from -current is not guaranteed to work, and you may upgrade to a package from -current only to find it has different dependencies from the "stable" package. If you've messed it up a few times, you're probably better off sticking with stock 10.2 stuff (although firefox/thunderbird 1.5 are nice).