Slackware 8.0 to 8.1 Upgrade HOWTO This document explains how to upgrade from Slackware 7.0, 7.1, or 8.0 to Slackware 8.1. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Before you begin, I would strongly recommend making a backup of your system, or, if not the entire system, at least the /etc directory. You might find that you need to refer to a few things about the upgrade process is complete. Back it up, or take your chances. OK, now that everything is safely backed up, let's proceed. :-) To do this, you'll need the Slackware 8.1 packages. If these are on a CD, create a new directory to mount the CD on so that it doesn't get in the way during the upgrade: mkdir /packages mount /dev/cdrom /packages The packages don't have to be on a CD-ROM, as an alternative you could copy the slackware directory (the one with the various package subdirectories in it, basically the "slackware" directory from the install CD) to someplace like /root/slackware/. The important thing is that you know where the slackware packages directory is. We'll refer to this location as $SLACKWARE in the following examples. 0. Put your machine in single-user mode: telinit 1 1. Upgrade your glibc shared libraries. This is important, or things will go haywire during the first part of the upgrade: installpkg $SLACKWARE/a/glibc-solibs-*.tgz 2. Upgrade your package utilities: installpkg $SLACKWARE/a/pkgtools-*.tgz 3. Install everything else: installpkg $SLACKWARE/*/*.tgz 4. Remove the old packages. Since we're using a longer package naming scheme now, we know any package with a name shorter than 10 characters must be an old package. Remove them with this command: cd /var/log/packages removepkg ? ?? ??? ???? ????? ?????? ??????? ???????? This will remove all packages with names from 1 to 8 characters long. 5. Install the new packages again. If you don't do this, you might have a few missing files here and there. installpkg $SLACKWARE/*/*.tgz 6. Make sure your system will boot. The kernel location has moved from / to /boot, so if you use LILO you might need to edit some paths in /etc/lilo.conf and then rerun LILO. If you use a bootdisk, you'll need to use makebootdisk to make a new bootdisk using the kernel in /boot. 7. Fix your config files. Some of the config files in /etc are going to need your attention. You'll find the new incoming config files on your system with the ".new" extension. You may need to fill these in with information from your old config files and then move them over. 8. Return to multi-user mode: telinit 3 At this point you should be running Slackware 8.1. :-) I wish everyone good luck with this! --- Patrick Volkerding volkerdi@slackware.com