[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

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Very useful and timely page addition. Thanks Eric.

I am wondering whether there needs to be discussion of the case where the previous release was using the generic kernel with an initrd. Following this guide would cause the old initrd.gz to be overwritten, leaving the user possibly unable to boot with the old kernel.

I would also like to see some discussion of how to handle the .new files. Slackpkg helps with this, but I also use vimdiff when dealing with configuration files with customised local settings (e.g.sshd_config, cupsd.conf) — David Allen 2012/09/20 17:52

In my humble sysadmin experience, it would be useful to add a side note that it's generally much less hassle to do a fresh clean install of a new release. On production servers, changing the hardware is a fine occasion to install a fresh release. On production desktops, it's really no big deal to backup files and configuration to a local server and/or external hard disk and do a fresh install. Niki Kovacs Fri Sep 21 09:48:19 CEST 2012

Hi Niki. A fresh install is usually better if your upgrade would span multiple releases (for instance, 10.1 → 13.37). But those cases are not supported by slackpkg anyway. I will add a note about this. Also I will stress that a new name should be used for a new initrd in order not to overwrite an existing initrd…
David, I will also expand a little about .new files.
Eric Hameleers 2012/09/21 04:48

Just saw the changes you made regarding initrd and .new files (I must have missed the updates in the recent changes list). Thankyou for addressing those little concerns. — David Allen 2012/09/26 08:05

I used a somewhat different method when I upgraded a couple months back. However, I like your method and may try it next year when Pat officially sets Current to Beta again for 15. :-)V. T. Eric Layton 2012/09/21 18:13


Hi Eric. Very nice job. Just a question here: shouldn't slackpkg be updated using the slackware media before its first usage? My reasoning is that at the first usage the mirrors file won't have 14.0 mirrors for example if I'm upgrading from 13.37 to 14.0. — escaflown 2012/09/28 21:18


I believe, its worth to mention that, the user must change the file in /etc/slackpkg/mirrors ,to make sure that the version link, they are trying is in the list. I just blanked for some minutes, when I did the upgrade process, since every thing for 13.37 is up-to-date. After changing a mirror link to 14.0, things started to progress… - crond

 talk:howtos:slackware_admin:systemupgrade ()