Overview ======== This package provides slackware-upgrade-system, a script that performs a full upgrade of a Slackware distribution. Installation ============ Run "make install" as root. The slackware-upgrade-system will be installed to /sbin, and its man page, slackware-upgrade-system.8, to /usr/man/man8. These are most suitable locations for Slackware. To install them elsewhere, use the following Makefile variables: SBINDIR - Directory to install slackware-upgrade-system to. MANDIR - toplevel directory for man page installation (/usr/man). MAN8DIR - directory for the man page installation ($(MANDIR)/man8). Usage ===== Before upgrade, please make sure you backup all sensitive data on your system. When upgrading a remote machine, it advisable to have a KVM console attached to it, so that you can intervene if the box refuses to boot. Please read slackware-upgrade-system(8) to familiarize yourself with the script and its options. Run slackware-upgrade-system in dry-run mode: slackware-upgrade-system -n This will look for the nearest next release available, create the list of packages to be upgraded, installed and removed and will print the results. This run will not touch any files on your filesystem (excepting the slackware-upgrade-system logs, see below). Instead it will verbosely print what would have been done during real upgrade. Inspect its output to see if it actually does what you need. In particular, the upgrade will most likely decide to remove some packages during the upgrade. These are the packages that existed in your current release, but have been removed in the next one, or the packages you have installed from third-party sources. You may wish to retain any of them or provide replacements, or reinstall them afterward. If you wish to retain any of them, create a list of packages to retain and supply it to the script using the -k command line option (see the man page for details). To provide a replacement, use the -p option. For example, when upgrading from 14.1 to 14.2, the "procps" package will be removed. The utilities it used to provide have been moved to the "procps-ng" package. So, when upgrading from 14.1 to 14.2, it is a good idea to use slackware-upgrade-system -p procps-ng For your information, the list of removed packages is left in file /var/log/slackware-upgrade-system-

-.removed (see below). When you are finished with the dry run, proceed to the actual upgrade. Run slackware-upgrade-system with any additional options you decided to give it after the dry run. After completion, the script will create three files for your consideration. In the discussion below,

stands for the original Slackware version number, and stands for the new Slackware version number (the version you upgraded to): /var/log/slackware-upgrade-system-

-.log Log file. Contains detailed transcript of all actions performed during the upgrade. /var/log/slackware-upgrade-system-

-.removed A list of packages removed during the upgrade. A package is removed if the new release does not provide a replacement for it. This may not always be desirable, and you may reinstall some of them afterward. /var/log/slackware-upgrade-system-

-.conffiles A list of configuration file replacements created during the upgrade. These are configuration files provided by the upgraded packages that are left in the filesystem along with your current file versions. They have the same names as the original files, but with the ".new" suffix. Please revise these files. You may need to merge them with your actual files, or move them over, or simply remove them. Before attempting to reboot your system, please make sure that the bootloader has been updated for the new kernel. Special notes ============= We recommend to always upgrade to the next release, without skipping release numbers (even though the script allows you to do so). For example, instead of upgrading from 14.0 to 14.2, run two subsequent upgrades. First, upgrade your system, to 14.1 and make sure everything works as expected. Then, upgrade it to 14.2. License ======= This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see .