CORRECTION

This post in not clear in the description of the probs, the information is confused by stampede of conflicting memories of fast scrolling data and unfamiliarity with sane debugging procedures (that which is clearly not my cup of tea).

READ PAST IT






Following review on Distrowatch Weekly - https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?i...231002#zenwalk - I have seen that after install the second round of updates (the first being automatic) makes the system an unhappy paperweight: upgrading glibc from 2.33 to 2.3x renders any operations fruitless, the terminal claiming glibc "not found". Rebooting results then in scary arcanity written in small characters, mostly vertical.
I tried with two laptops, both Intel, both with and without X, and also tried blacklisting glibc, with a different errmsg which I forgot, then dropped the idea of chrooting and decided to revive my old account in LQ.
My primary question here is if anyone has such a problem, because it seems not happening in the wild besides to me and Jesse Smith.

Regards

SOLVED (somehow)

The issue that bricks the Zenwalk install is due to the not conformant update & upgrade procedure. Following the review in the aforementioned link to Distrowatch I worked with the slackpckg program by issuing the canonical commands update / install-new / upgrade-all / clean-system (after commenting out one entry from the /etc/slackpkg/mirrors file). At the moment of the first reboot after install the glibc is 2.37, when the breakage kicks in seems to be 2.34 or 2.36 (again, bad memory) with errmsg reporting problem with LDD in finding libssc or libgtk3-nocsd. Before starting with the update per se, prompt asks for deletion of files - sorry, didn't write the down - offering an "ignore" options which is actually ignored leaving only remove.

Instead the canonical way to update Zenwalk is to use the netpkg program, after which the installed version of glibs is 2.38 seameleaasly. Jesse Smith of Distrowatch casually missed that point, and if I had to ford the creek every week (plus life and work) with a new distro and its manners I would have had the same problem.

Something changed in these three weeks:

- the first time, working without X a prompt appeared from netpkg mandating updates. That, plus the slackpkg updates immediately borks the system

- the second or third time the netpkg prompt didn't show up but the breakage was also seamless

- this morning still no netpkg prompt, I went on with the slackpkg updates which resulted in errmsg as above but could reboot nevertheless. And I could still install simple progs like nano or mc, and could remove htop, for instance. But running again the slackpkg series of command for update & upgrade then breaks the system and reboot grinds after a handful of seconds

Now, request for comment: Netpkg is said to be "slack-agnostic", so would I have the same breakage by using netpkg in place of slackpkg when dealing with our noble and old wizard Slackware?

Regards