slackware 13

This article has been updated. The original slackroll method of updating to Slackware "Current" has been removed because it was "all wrong", .

Last week's tips and tricks section provided information on how to "upgrade" a stable Mandriva release to the latest development branch. Although running development trees and upgrading them in regular intervals can be risky and may even render your system unbootable or otherwise unstable, it is an excellent way of participating in the development of your favourite distribution and reporting bugs to upstream projects. Needless to say, some Linux knowledge and experience is required, so this should only be done by those users who know how to fix their bootloader if things go wrong!

Today we continue this series with a look at how to run the development tree of the oldest surviving Linux distribution - Linux. From my experience, running Slackware "current" is generally trouble-free, certainly more so that running the development trees of most other major distributions. This is partly the result of Slackware's philosophy of building the distribution from unmodified "vanilla" upstream sources, and partly due the founder's selective conservatism with regards to switching to newer, but not well-tested core components, including the Linux kernel. Despite that, most end-user applications are highly up-to-date and running Slackware current provides the user with a modern system with many of the latest applications available for Linux.

So if you have a stable Slackware system installed, how to you switch to the "current" tree? This is somewhat less straightforward than in other distributions because Slackware doesn't believe in dependency-resolving package management systems, so the "proper" way of doing this would be to download each individual software package from the current tree and install it with pkgtools. Given that this tree gets on average 2 - 3 updates per week, some of which could contain dozens of packages, this would be very time consuming indeed! Instead, we are going to use slackpkg, an automated package management system that has recently entered the main Slackware tree after years in the extra directory. Here are the steps to upgrade your stable Slackware system to Slackware "current":

1.     Set your preferred slackware-current mirror by uncommenting the relevant line in /etc/slackpkg/mirrors.

2.     Update package list: # slackpkg update

3.     Install new packages: # slackpkg install-new

4.     Upgrade all installed packages: # slackpkg upgrade-all

5.     Run the above again (due to recent switch from TGZ to TXZ packages): # slackpkg upgrade-all

6.     Remove unneeded packages: # slackpkg clean-system

7.     Repeat steps 2, 3, 4 and 6 once or twice a week to ensure that you are always in sync with the "current" development.

That's all. Once you are done and everything went as planned, you'll be running a system with Linux kernel 2.6.29.2, glibc 2.9, GCC 4.3.3, KDE 4.2.3, Xfce 4.6.1, Firefox 3.0.10, GIMP 2.6.6 and many other applications in their latest versions!

Dip your toes into the future Slackware Linux 13.0 by running the distribution's "current" tree