I've been on a mad upgrade path lately. I've upgraded all the network hardware and operating systems, the Slackbox is the last one.

I've been running Slackware 13.37 for years and it's been rock solid, the reason I chose Slackware.

This upgrade has been the most painful upgrade I've ever done.

Slackware current, first error, during install choose to configure network: error, /sbin/netconfig: no such file, ok, I'll configure the network later.

Second error, during installation I tried to install LILO: error, LILO failed to install (no other message) ok, I'll use GRUB.

Third error, bypassing the network setup and LILO, installing GRUB, everything looked good...until the reboot, GRUB rescue mode...



Thinking I had either a corrupt ISO or my hardware couldn't handle the current, I downloaded 14.2 from a different mirror.

Installing this had all the same errors/issues.



Now I'm in WTF mode, I downloaded the latest Ubuntu, it installed and ran fine. I downloaded the latest Mint, it installed and ran fine. I downloaded the latest Debian, you guessed it, it installed and ran fine.



My questions are:

What's up with Slackware?

Anybody else having these issues?

Would be good to know the specs of your Slackware box.

How did you upgrade? I would of upgraded one release at a time which would of taken a few steps from 13.37 instead of jumping directly to current. A lot has changed since 13.37 and at this point it might be better to start with a fresh install. It sounds like it would take a lot of doing to fix your broken install.

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'Upgrade' was the key word I missed, orbea. A fresh install for something like this would totally be the way to go. I always do a fresh install, so when someone else says 'upgrade' I assume they mean the same thing [i.e. a version upgrade rather than a technical one].

4 members found this post helpful.

Upgrading can certainly work and it is what I would of done, I haven't reinstalled Slackware in years. For the OP I imagine several things have gone wrong and discovering as well as fixing all these issues may not be trivial. Slackware is the kind of distro where it will do what you tell it to do even if that is very wrong.

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Ok, as for the specs on the box, frankly, I don't remember the details. I do know it's a Gigabyte board, don't remember the specific model. 4 GB RAM, 2 ATA drives, 1 80GB(OS) and 1 500GB(DATA). I'll look into it and get more details.

Partitioning:

SDA: / 20GB /var 25GB /usr 25GB /swap 10GB

SDB: /home 200GB /downloads 200GB /misc 100GB

Perhaps I incorrectly used "upgrade" I formatted the partitions on SDA and attempted to do a new install.

I currently have Debain 9.9 installed, it went smoothly and is running very well...But I'd rather have Slack.

Ok, there's one potential pain point right there. Modern Udev really doesn't like a separated /usr partition. I'd encourage you to merge it into /.

Interesting, thanks.

Can you point me to some documentation on this?

It is obvious that the modern Slackware is not able to boot properly with a separate /usr device, unless you mount it too from initrd. No one needs a map for.

I tell this from my own experience, as I use a relative non-standard setup on some of my computers:

an /usr put in a (compressed) squashfs, which is separate device, to make a full install with Plasma5 within 5GB occupied storage space.

LuckyCyborg: Have you tried reporting this to the eudev developers on github? Maybe they could fix it?

https://github.com/gentoo/eudev/issues

I only ask for documentation because I am able to get Debian up and running with this same partition scheme. And, this is the same scheme I used under Slack 13.37. Plus, I do like to read and learn.
I am not doubting what is being said, I would just like to learn.

Well, I thought that my non-standard setup is to be blamed, instead of eudev or whatever.

Specially, after I learnt that there are now distributions where /bin, /sbin and /lib(64) are just symlinks to their /usr counterparts.

So, I think that a separate /usr is obsolete, unless you do special measures in initrd, like I do.

Heck, if you look on /boot/initrd-tree/usr/lib64 you will notice that even GLIB is needed by that eudev and friends.

I am not a specialist on Debian, but about this aspect, I doubt that the latest Debian release behave different than the today Slackware.

It might just be that you are running into a bug that other people rarely see because of the non-standard setup, regardless the eudev developers would know more.

Honestly, I think that rather an eudev bug, it is a result of the (distribution's) packaging policies, where certain dependencies (both as programs and libraries) are put on /usr

In other hand, I doubt that Slackware should forcefully put all of those within root, just and only to satisfy those separate /usr setups, when the others go in the opposite direction, like we can see there:

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Sof...orTheUsrMerge/

And, how we raised the Debian flag: https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge

However, I am just a simple Slackware user, so I doubt that my opinion worth.