upgrade to slackware current – 3339 days old

[labatts]

okay i've been toying with the idea of doing an upgrade from slackware 9.1 to slackware current.i've read his upgrade text and know what to do

just seems like alot of work,not so much downloading an installing the packages but md5sum'ing them all.My eyes are hurting already.

is there a quicker way to verify the packages,other than one at a time..

and is it even worth the hassle...really it's not that i need to be on the bleeding edge or anything.i just see it as a learning experience,you know getting a feel about the inner workings of slack.

[Grogan]

Yes, read the md5sum file that's in the directory. There's a command at the top. Search the forum here... there was a thread about this just a few days ago.

You're not going to get any feel for the inner workings of slack by doing this. It's really got little to do with understanding a Linux system. It's just using the package installer.

If you want to upgrade packages, that's one thing, but I would not go through that procedure in that manner.

Start with glibc, and gcc so you have the core runtimes that those packages are going to need. Use upgradepkg from single user mode for glibc.

Or wait until slackware-current is closer to a release and someone will come out of the woodwork who is hosting nightly ISOs or something. I always see them.

[labatts]

thanks G. i think i'll go looking for the iso's

[Dramen]

labatts, they have slackware-current iso's dated 4/1/04 download speed was good, I got 360kb/s sustained.

there's 2 disks, so I guess they eliminate some stuff. kernel is 2.4.25, xfree 4.4

ftp://inferno.bioinformatics.vt.edu/...kware-current/

[labatts]

thanks dramen...

much appreciated.

slackware current up and running

now i'm sort of waiting for something to screw up

gotta love open source where else can you upgrade your operating system whenever you want at whatever stage it's at.

lot's of fun!

[Cool Canuck]

Do I see LFS in your future??

[labatts]

ya linux from scratch seems really cool CC but you'll be well into playing with lfs long before i even think about trying something like that.

wonder why G hasn't given that a try

he would probably create one hell of a distro.

[Grogan]

Because I like slackware for a base system.

You need a working Linux system anyway to build LFS.

[BobGuy]

There is always gentoo linux.

[Cool Canuck]

Originally posted by Grogan
Because I like slackware for a base system.

You need a working Linux system anyway to build LFS.

Which begs the question "You ever wonder how the first system was installed?" Chicken or the egg.

A Knopix or Slax disk will suffice if one was so inclinded.

[Grogan]

Actually, no, it probably wouldn't Cool. You need the full range of development tools on the host system to do something like that.

I have actually installed Knoppix to a hard disk and it took me a while to get the installation in shape for building more software.

[ralpha6]

I messed around with LFS for about a week when I had Redhat 9 installed. I couldn't make a go of it and credited it to Redhat not being "up2date" enough. Never did figure out what I may have been lacking. I may some day venture into LFS again. But I'm like Grogan, I like Slackware the way it is so...

[Dramen]

...our own linux distro!

GLinux
GroganiX
GroLinux
gNix
BBTLinux


btw, thought this a pretty good slack mirror site.

http://www.abnormalpenguin.com/slackware-mirrors.php

[Cool Canuck]

Originally posted by Grogan
Actually, no, it probably wouldn't Cool. You need the full range of development tools on the host system to do something like that.

I have actually installed Knoppix to a hard disk and it took me a while to get the installation in shape for building more software.

Hummm, I see a challange in here. Might be a good retirement project. Obviously got lots more learning to do, but figured it one could format disks, create directories, copy files and compile programs; one could get a system installed.

Being lazy and all, for now I'll let Patrick figure out what program versions, dependencies and file systems work. If I did it, I would plagerize his scripts anyway and end up with a customized Slackware.

[labatts]

i know what you mean cool.

real hard to improve on perfection

[Grogan]

I don't think it would be all that much of a challenge to build LFS, more like tedium. (It's just following a bunch of steps). What makes it tedium is that you have to do it all at once.

In a way it should be super easy, because you're building and installing everything clean. No old headers to delete, no old libraries to ferret out and remove.

Afterwards might be a challenge, because you're on your own building and configuring all your software. That's where the spoon feeding ends.

The init scripts that come with LFS are fairly simple sysvinit style scripts. It might be a bit of a challenge to adapt things to slackware's bsd style scripts... you'd have to do it at compile time when you build "init". You have to edit some definitions in a header file, for some hard coded paths. (paths.h)

[labatts]

you mention slackware having bsd style scripts G ,i've heard this about slackware before.how much of bsd architecture does slack use?

[Grogan]

Not really very much, we're just talking about the style of init scripts and some of the directory layout.

Most distributions use System V style scripts where there are individual directories /etc/rc0.d through rc6.d that contain symbolic links whose names determine which real scripts in /etc/rc.d/init.d are going to execute and which are not and the order in which they are going to be processed. Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake and Debian for examples.

Slackware, and "BSD style" init, uses a single directory rc.d containing individual scripts for the runlevels, and to start services. What is processed first, is laid out in the master script rc.S and subsequent scripts for the individual runlevels (e.g. rc.M for multiuser modes). Init first gets it's directives from /etc/inittab which is how it knows to process rc.S. Take a look at them, and you'll see how it all flows.

[Cool Canuck]

Here is an article explaining Slack's init process that I have bookmarked. It is not all that complicated if you follow it through.

http://www.slackfiles.net/documentat...cles/init.html

[labatts]

thanks cool.