Slackware

Slackware is a cathedral type GNU\Linux installation. It is stable, and provides a lot of software. Nearly everything you need will be included.

Updating

Basic update steps (not for major releases):

ref:

• https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:slackware_admin:systemupgrade
• https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:beginners_guide

slackpkg update

Read the changelog file in /var/lib/slackpkg/ChangeLog.txt to see if you need to make any changes, based on updates. Well, you should try to, at least.

slackpkg install-new
slackpkg upgrade-all
slackpkg clean-system

NOTE: I technically, tend to not clean up old packages much. Bad habit, but it sometimes puts things you want to keep there.

TRAP: you aren't done yet. Did you upgrade the kernel? If so, you must reconfigure lilo.

the steps for this are something like:

/usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_comnand_generator.sh -k 3.2.29

NOTE: see /boot/README.mkinitrd NOTE: be careful not to mix up -k with -l, -l is used later.

/usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh -l /boot/vmlinuz-huge-4.4.208

This would be wrong at this juncture.

It will give you a new command to run. Note what command it gives you, and edit the /boot/initrd.gz to be something like /boot/initrd_3_2_29.gz, so you have an old one.

This way you retain the old boot information, as a backup.

Now run the command. here's one example of what it looks like:

# mkinitrd -c -k 4.4.208 -f ext4 -r /dev/sda1 -m xhci-pci:ohci-pci:ehci-pci:xhci-hcd:uhci-hcd:ehci-hcd:hid:usbhid:i2c-hid:hid_generic:hid-c>

# mkinitrd -c -k 4.4.208 -f ext4 -r /dev/sda1 -m xhci-pci:ohci-pci:ehci-pci:xhci-hcd:uhci-hcd:ehci-hcd:hid:usbhid:i2c-hid:hid_generic:hid-c>

That makes the initial ram disk. Now you need to update lilo.

run mkinitrd again, and it will give you a block to append to lilo config.

/usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh -l /boot/vmlinux-generic-3.2.29

Note that this command will again spit out a initrd = /boot/initrd.gz in the config, that you must change to have the version number differentiator you added in the previous step, if you did so. Really, you just need a backup kernel. If you make one backup kernel, that is enough.

After lilo.conf has been edited, run

lilo

as root.