So I decided to try swaret out because I thought it would be a quick way to update my aging packages. After doing this, however, I had to fix some things. Currently, I am not completely sure how to fix X.

During my latest attempt to reconfigure X I decided to roll back all of the packages back to 10.2. I simply inserted my boot cd and installed all of the packages in the x directory.

When I try to do a xorgconfig it crashes out after choosing to do a new config file and complains that it can't load libpcidata.so. I actually have that library file but it is apparently version 8 (the error message says it wants version 7). Does anyone know how I can (ie where I can find it) reinstall that library? Better yet, does anyone know the best way that I can go about restoring x? Do I need to reinstall other packages from the cd?

I also reinstalled x11 using swaret but this had the same result (no surprise there).

By the way I am using a custom 2.6.13 kernel on slackware 10.2 on an IBM TP 600E. I don't think that the hardware or kernel has anything to do with the problem, however, since these have not changed since my system worked prior to the swaret usage.

I appreciate your help,
phil

If I understand correctly, you didn't downgraded X11 packages but installed them beside new version. You've had to use upgradepkg instead of installpkg.
I guess you have to remove X11 packages of newer version - or simply remove all X11 packages and install anew from 10.2 CD. If swaret upgraded library packages from l/ you should also do the same procedure for them.

After all it's a very bad idea to mix packages from different releases or current branch.

removing all of the X11 packages and then reinstalling from the 10.2 cd worked like a charm - took only a few minutes. I should have tried that before! Thank you for pointed this out to me. Perhaps if I had manually uninstalled the old X11 packages before downloading the updated packages it would have worked as well.

Thanks again!

phil

yeah, swaret makes things easier ...when it works.

I prefer to just keep control of my system and upgrade packages manually. If you want to upgrade something just use from the folder you downloaded all the upgraded packages. Another handy option is This will upgrade any current packages you have installed and install any that you don't have.

If you are interested, I upgraded my KDE by downloading the following packages in a directory and running the later command from within:

kde/*
x/*
l/glibc
l/libpng
d/gcc
d/gcc++
a/acl

Note: you will also need to upgrade the following if you are using arts or any programs that depend on it (IE noatun or kaboodle).

a/aaa_elflibs
l/arts
l/audiofile
l/libao
l/libmad
l/libogg
l/libvorbis

It's a little bit more work, but I know exactly what I did to my system, instead of trusting a program to do things correctly.

regards,
...aaron

Thanks for the info Aaron. I used to do all of that to keep my packages updated (using ldd and reading the DOCS to figure out the dependencies), but this past year I have had way too many other committments and I fell sorely behind in keeping my slack box up to date. This concerns me because I know that there are security updates as well. So, at the minimum I wanted to at least get the security updates. I know there is a list of the available patches at http://www.slackware.com/security/ and I can subscribe to a mailing list, but I wanted to also look into more automated alternatives in order to save me time. Perhaps it is foolish to trust a set of scripts to keep my system up to date, but I wanted to give it a try. As I said I fell sorely behind.

I'm also looking into testing slapt-get. Basically I just need something to tell me what packages have updates available, which ones are security updates, and I can choose to install from there. I may post a new thread about these issues in the future after I have spent more time exploring it myself.

After slackware 11 comes out I'll probably just try to keep up with the patches.

Thanks again for your help. Please post any further comments that you may have.

That's a good idea. Let me know which one worked best for you. You might want to consider trying other distro's package management systm and see if any of those run well on not.

I've always liked gentoo's portage, but you might find one you really like. I'm interested now, to see if portage could work in slackware. I wouldn't see why not.

Any ways, let me know what you find out!

regards,
...aaron

As an aside, When I'm running wine on another box of mine, I can actually "update' my system on Microsoft's Autoupdate site. Really. Makes me laugh for hours.....

Yea, I really like portage as well. I think of it as a beefed up swaret that has a lot more choices on how to configure it. I think most people would probably say it is a bit more reliable for gentoo than swaret is for slackware, but any automated package tool can result in a broken system if not configured and used correctly. The advantage of portage, though, is that I can just stick to the security updates if I want to (some package managers do this by updating programs with SUID bits- I'm not sure what method Gentoo uses within portage).

As far as porting portage to Slackware...I did a little looking around and found out that this has already been done. The Emerde Project (currently Beta) is working on this (http://emerde.freaknet.org/). I would wait to use this until it is more stable, however, unless you just use it on a test box.

Also I found a thread in the Gentoo forums that contains a script to port portage to any linux distro (http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=125553). It's quite a long thread and should probably be rewritten into a tutorial, but from the little bit that I have read some people have used it for Slackware. Based upon this thread the easiest way to install portage is to use the rescue tarball to essentially emerge portage onto your system.

HOWEVER, after reading some more threads it seems that trying to use portage in slackware usually results in a broken system since Portage doesn't always recognize the native packages you already have installed on your system. The solution to me then would be to have all installed packages from portage instead of pkgtool. This would require a lot of unistalling and sounds like a waste of time as you would essentially be using a different distro at that point.

Of course using any type of package manager in slackware is bastardizing the distro so if a package manager is truly needed then so is a different distro. You should keep an eye out on Voltalinux (http://www.sicurezzarete.com/voltalinux/) as it is a slackware derived distro that uses NetBSD's package system.

Have ever heard of Stratdate? Wikipedia sites it as tool to update Slackware to current "using official Slackware tools and by using officially mandated upgrade methods for a safe upgrade". It may be worth looking into.

Swaret actually seems to be the best automated update solution for Slackware currently as it seems to have a lot more rich features than programs such as slapt-get. A couple of the features that come to mind are having the option to check for dependencies (can be turned off so people should see this as a down side), it supposedly can find user installed packages that others miss, and it gives you the option to compile from source when downloading as well.

Overall, I think the ideal solution for me is to simply keep up to date using the posted security patches while using ckinstall or SlackBuilds to help keep track of new programs. Occasionally, I might use something like swaret to update to -current so I don't have to reinstall my system or manually update everything. Then again, maybe something like Voltalinux would be a better distro for me. I don't think I could leave slack though ...

If you find anything else about these matters or have further comments on this maybe a new thread should be started as I believe the topic for this one is done. If you do please email me (with a clear message hearder) as I am very interested in this.

--phil