Slackware upgrade to 14.1

Yes, upgrade from 14.0 to 14.1. And it's not as little as seems - kernel goes from 3.2.45 to 3.10.17 and a lot of system packages get upgraded - a lot like half an hour of running text in console.
As a guide I used this superb one, and followed it quite punctually - with only a slight differences:
- I tried to do as much on desktop (new lilo menuentry, install of new kernel packages, new initrd, blacklisting kernel and third party repos...
As a note - I did 'installpkg' for kernel-things and not upgraded. And that irritated 'slackpkg' afterwards (similarly-named packages)- so I had to keep kernel packages blacklisted.
- I did not use init 1, as it does not have net, but used init 3. If you download whole bunch before and install from this, then you can do everything in single-user and be safer.
- I ended up (before reboot) with Nvidia install. Did it like this:
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-319.49.run --kernel-name='3.10.17'

The thing booted up nicely - gdm, openbox, nitrogen, compton, tint2 - all worked totally alright. Overall memory usage dropped 20M compared to 14.0. CPU usage remained on 2%+2% (Debian, by the way, stays on 1% when idle).
Then came problems - which took me about 8 hours to resolve:
- As being smart afterwards, first thing to do should be deleting all things in your .cache folder. Else there will be strange apps' settings' problems.
- gksu. It didn't work, I reinstalled, it worked - once. I reinstalled all (libgtop, libgksu, gksu)... no cookie. I went for gksudo, it worked once...
Well, interesting, isn't it?
The culprit is 'shadow' package - see here. I didn't install salixs' fix 'gnsu', but downgraded from 4.1.5 to old 4.1.4.3 (and blacklisted it). And that did it - after some 3 hours fruitlessly thrown away (#^^%&*&^).
- spacefm. Despite compiling all fresh, still has strange behaviour - occasional resizing of panels and kinda laggy performance... It probably was exactly this 'old-cache-problem'.
- Volumeicon is forgetting volume settings, on every boot. | Edit: It seems, whole problem was master volume gone missing during upgrade... (3 days later) - no, it wasn't. Now it seems that removing .lock file (created during upgrade?) in /var/lib/alsa fixed it, finally. Well, we'll see... No, it didn't fix it... And the reason for that nag (and some other vague abnormalities) was my own syntax error in rc.M ... Bloody never change your conf-files by typing (if possible). |
- Clock went berserk again (my specific bios clock problem 'me like to be three hours wrong and it stays like that'). Fixed it so:
hwclock --set --date "11/17/2013 08:54:10", and then hwclock -s
Means, set your date-and-time manually, and tell it also to kernel. And look here.
- qbittorrent missing libboost_system.so.1.49.0. Installed alienbob version for 14.1 from slakfinder and nothing changed, lib still missing. Then I made it from source - and got exactly the same result. But ln -s of 1.49.0 to existing 1.54.0 did the trick.
- gparted - the same type of thing. Missing libparted.so.0. Created symlink to libparted.so.2 and gparted started (and worked) fine.
- xfce4-terminal got its name back (previously 'Terminal'). So I whined about that silly name before... now, of course, I whine again:  When arriving to Openbox first time after upgrade, there is no terminal available (except some other backup terminal, if you had one. If you didn't, you have to go to console and fix at least one exec-name in nano. And bloody shortcut in your rc.xml needs fixing too.
By the way, if you define window-opening-postions in the same rc.xml, then keep in mind - 'class' for xfce4-terminal is 'Xfce4-terminal'.

That's it. Some few annoyances remain, but overall - upgrade can be called success.
And just to mention - there is always reinstall option, but, in this case, it wouldn't be any easier. Problems are of new packages, not of upgrade as such.
| Note, as of 23.11.2013: SBO is still missing whole 14.1 (but, I am sure most of 14.0 stuff is eminently usable anyway). Shittier is that Slacky and Kikinovak also are still missing 14.1 - and that drives slackpkg+ a bit crazy... Sensible thing seems to take those two temporarily out of mirrors (and repos) list.
-- As of the very end of December, the last problematic repo - Kikinovaks' - has returned. He had severe recontruction bout in his servers. |