Usually, my first instinct in upgrading a freshly installed Slackware setup is to upgrade the kernel. Linux 2.4.x was good and very stable, but the newer 2.6.x release series have made a number of improvements. I usually compile the kernel from source, to ensure that I get all the options I do and do not want accounted for. I strongly recommend you spend some time learning how to build the kernel if you don't already know. I will include all the instructions I use when I have time, for now I'll assume you've completed that task and are running a fresh and optimized kernel version 2.6.20 or higher. In another post, I will discuss more specifics on hardware and software configuration, this post is all about upgrading your system to slackware-current. The procedure itself is not terribly difficult at all. I will assume at this point that you've configured your networking system. You can download the whole thing right from the prompt using a command like
wget -r -np http://slackware.mirrors.pair.com/slackware-current/slackwareThis should pull the entire distribution down from the server for you. Of course, I am all about choice, so I download and install only what I want. Sorry Emacs editor, but I don't take advantage of all your powerful features. You'll notice that each folder represents a package set from before. If you've done a full install, upgrading is very simple, enter any one of these folders and simply type the commands:
upgradepkg --dry-run --install-new *tgz
upgradepkg --dry-run --install-new *tgz | grep -v "already installed"
upgradepkg --install-new *tgz
The first command will give you a list of what will occur with the packages in the folder, some will be installed, some upgraded and others won't be touched. The second is a nice filter to get rid of anything that's not going to be touched and see what the actual actions of the third command would be. The upgradepkg command is nice because it cleans up duplicate files and removes old versions before installing the new one. If you want more control over the packages you install or don't install, go into any of the folders and type the command pkgtool. You can then access a list of the packages that are installed on your machine and selectively add and remove packages. Take care not to completely remove something important, like glibc, without adding it's replacement. For me, I want to upgrade at least D, L, KDE, X, and XAP in full. The L package requires a 2.6.x kernel, so if you've skipped that step, please go back.
It should be noted that if you plan to use KDE's KMail and Kontact programs that you need to search out and install gpgme and libgpg-error. Also, check to make sure that the links from /usr/lib/X11 to /etc/X11 are in place, I found that for each of the linked folders (app-defaults, fs, fvwm, etc) were to ../../../etc/X11/ . This causes some headaches with Xorg, making the server behave somewhat erratically. Sometimes it will start, other times it won't, occasionally I'll get my window manager, other times just a graphical prompt. My fix was to delete each of these and replace with a fresh symlink. For example, the first two, app-defaults and fs, the commands looked like
rm /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults
ln -s /etc/X11/app-defaults /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults
rm /usr/lib/X11/fs
ln -s /etc/X11/fs /usr/lib/X11/fs
At this point, after we've upgraded all the packages to the new versions and installed KDE, Firefox and the like, if you haven't already done so run the pkgtool command and choose the second-to-last option: Run setup scripts. The only setup script I'm interested in running again is the xwmconfig, but if there's something you'd like to reconfigure at this point, you should do so. I set myself to use KDE (xinitrc.kde) but there are a variety of other options, so try them all and see which one you like the best.
After upgrading all these package sets that you so desire, we move on to configuring the hardware.
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