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Hi Slackers!

Slackware 9.1 hit the market stalls and the uneasy feeling of beying
left out started bothering me.
But 9.0 is working well on my boxes (one of them has a working but
unused install of 8.1).

Soooo "To nine-one or not nine-one, this is THE question?"

Suggestions welcome. No flames, I have a lighter and am going now for a
smoko.

Have fun.

Stanislaw.
Slack user from Ulladulla.

Stanislaw Flatto wrote:
> Hi Slackers!
>
> Slackware 9.1 hit the market stalls and the uneasy feeling of beying
> left out started bothering me.
> But 9.0 is working well on my boxes (one of them has a working but
> unused install of 8.1).
>
> Soooo "To nine-one or not nine-one, this is THE question?"
>
> Suggestions welcome. No flames, I have a lighter and am going now for a
> smoko.
>

Hmmm...Well, I think the usual answer is "If it ain't broke, don't fix
it..." And that's advice I normally follow. i tend to be very
conservative with upgrades, waiting for a release to be out for quite
some time, before using it, at least on production machines. And then,
only upgrading if there is a particular need.

That being said, I had a 9.0 box I used for testing, and upgraded it to
9.1 just to see how well it would go, using the UPGRADE.txt
instructions. Things went so well, I upgraded 2 other 9.0 boxes. Also
very easy, but they were both *very* simple installs, dedicated to
specific tasks.
Finally, I dove in head first, and upgraded my main workstation at home
from 8.0. I had been putting this off because of the changes to package
names between 8.0 and 8.1, and since it was still working just fine...
Once again, it was relatively easy. Only a few "gotcha's", all due to
mistakes on my part.

So...I personally don't see a *huge* benefit in 9.1 vs. 9.0...
9.0 is a fine release ( as all slack releases tend to be ). But I have
no regrets about upgrading the systems...

How's that for a non-comittal response ???


--
- Matt -

Stanislaw Flatto wrote:
>
> Soooo "To nine-one or not nine-one, this is THE question?"
>
> Suggestions welcome. No flames, I have a lighter and am going now for
> a smoko.

I've been upgrading ever since Slackware 8.0 so my disks was becoming a
bit messy. So I've decided long time ago that 9.1 should be a totally
clean install.

Late Tuesday tcpd started to act up very strange, so decided it was now.
Wednesday i spend the evening cleaning up and backing up /home and I was
only at the net to check the price of a DVD-burner.
Thursday i booted from my customized Slackware 9.1 CD-1, wiped out my
partitions and installed Slackware 9.1. Rest of the evening I was busy
installing the programs and utilities I need.

So I've been running Slackware 9.1 for 3 days now. I haven't found
anything itching so far, but on the contrary I haven't seen anything
calling for an upgrade.

Things seems to run a little faster but that's maybe because I've gotten
read of the pollution from my disks.
--
Thomas O.

This area is designed to become quite warm during normal operation.

Stanislaw Flatto wrote:
> Hi Slackers!
>
> Slackware 9.1 hit the market stalls and the uneasy feeling of beying
> left out started bothering me.
> But 9.0 is working well on my boxes (one of them has a working but
> unused install of 8.1).
>
> Soooo "To nine-one or not nine-one, this is THE question?"
>
> Suggestions welcome. No flames, I have a lighter and am going now for a
> smoko.
>


I will be trying Slackware 9.1 soon - after noobishly hosing a perfectly
good 9.0 install hint:chown * is just as bad as rm -rf *...

No regular users can do <insert appropriate profatity> anymore, I figure
it's easier to reinstall than figure out which permissions I fucked up.
I also want to make some changes to the install, and fix some noob
mistakes I made on this install (first Linux install).

Not to mention, I WANT TO TRY 9.1 ;-)

I do have one question about reinstalling:
Will I be able to just copy over the config files from 9.0 (rc.firewall,
proftpd.conf, and the like) or did the changes introduce incompatibilites?

Oh, and of course - any neat new toys I should look at? :-)

On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 16:59:48 +0000, Ori wrote:

> Stanislaw Flatto wrote:

[ Snipped - others have answered already, FWIW, 9.1 "stock" looks better
(eye candy wise) IMO. Bouth upgades and an install went fine, here. ]

> I will be trying Slackware 9.1 soon - after noobishly hosing a perfectly
> good 9.0 install hint:chown * is just as bad as rm -rf *...

I differ in opinion on that. You still have your files...

> No regular users can do <insert appropriate profatity> anymore,

If you would be more specific that should help.
Are you sure you only used "chown" and not "chmod/chgrp" as well?

> I figure
> it's easier to reinstall than figure out which permissions I fucked up.

Maybe, but if you have the time for it - this might be a good learning
experiance. (You'll now whay perms are set the way the are after it.)

> I also want to make some changes to the install, and fix some noob
> mistakes I made on this install (first Linux install).

Understandable.

> Not to mention, I WANT TO TRY 9.1 ;-)

So did i, hence this post is from it (new `pan' looks neet as well).

> I do have one question about reinstalling:
> Will I be able to just copy over the config files from 9.0 (rc.firewall,
> proftpd.conf, and the like) or did the changes introduce incompatibilites?

Likely - yes, i have not found any that did not work jet.

> Oh, and of course - any neat new toys I should look at? :-)

`xine' is included... :-)

--
-Menno.

In alt.os.linux.slackware, Ori dared to utter,
> I will be trying Slackware 9.1 soon - after noobishly hosing a perfectly
> good 9.0 install hint:chown * is just as bad as rm -rf *...

Theoretically that can be fixed without reinstallation, while
recursively deleting everything by definition requires re-installation.
Looking at the MANIFEST.bz file included with Slackware 9.0, I noticed
this:

++========================================
||
|| Package: ./a/aaa_base-9.0.0-noarch-1.tgz
||
++========================================
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2003-03-10 11:33:01 ./
drwxr-xr-x root/bin 0 1997-10-06 01:10:09 bin/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 1997-10-06 01:10:09 dev/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2003-03-10 11:33:00 etc/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2001-02-05 17:47:32 etc/X11/

In other words, every file and directory created by the installation
has it's permissions documented here. In theory, you could script
something to check each file listed here or in the slocate database and
change it's permissions to reflect these.

> No regular users can do <insert appropriate profatity> anymore, I figure
> it's easier to reinstall than figure out which permissions I fucked up.

You FUBARed all your permissions IIRC, since you did a recursive chmod.
A recursive chown isn't too ahrd to fix, since most everything is owned
by root:root. Some files are owned by other users, such as /var and
/home. Outside of those directories everything should be pretty much
root:root.

> Will I be able to just copy over the config files from 9.0 (rc.firewall,
> proftpd.conf, and the like) or did the changes introduce incompatibilites?

That can only be answered on a case-by-case basis. Generally most
config files can be restored in place without much trouble. Pat doesn't
control how all the packages have changed between Slackware 9.0 and
9.1, but in practice most open source developers don't change the way
config files are parsed from release to release for just this reason.
New functionality is added, old functionality is kept in (albeit
usually deprecated) to maintain backwards compatability.

> Oh, and of course - any neat new toys I should look at? :-)

First thing I noticed was the new /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 script.

--
It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise,
Than for a man to hear the song of fools.
Ecclesiastes 7:5

Ori wrote:
[...]
> I will be trying Slackware 9.1 soon - after noobishly hosing a perfectly
> good 9.0 install hint:chown * is just as bad as rm -rf *...
[...]

The others have covered it; I just thought I would tell you of my favorite
newbee help request... He had gzipped everything in the /etc directory!
Think about that one.

> Not to mention, I WANT TO TRY 9.1 ;-)

I've been getting more and more satisfied with the safety in upgrading.
I've been continuously upgrading since about 8.1 to the present with no
mishap, and these days I do them 4 boxes at a time without a trial on just
one

Neil

Alan Hicks wrote:

> Theoretically that can be fixed without reinstallation,

Probably - still, I'd like to try 9.1.

> while
> recursively deleting everything by definition requires re-installation.
> Looking at the MANIFEST.bz file included with Slackware 9.0, I noticed
> this:
<snipped contents of file>
>
> In other words, every file and directory created by the installation
> has it's permissions documented here. In theory, you could script
> something to check each file listed here or in the slocate database and
> change it's permissions to reflect these.
>

Cool - useful to know.

Unfortunately, I'm just learning programming, and scripting is still
beyond me (but I plan to learn!)

>
> You FUBARed all your permissions IIRC,

I think I know that better than anyone else...

>>Will I be able to just copy over the config files from 9.0 (rc.firewall,
>>proftpd.conf, and the like) or did the changes introduce incompatibilites?
>
>
> That can only be answered on a case-by-case basis. Generally most
> config files can be restored in place without much trouble. Pat doesn't
> control how all the packages have changed between Slackware 9.0 and
> 9.1, but in practice most open source developers don't change the way
> config files are parsed from release to release for just this reason.
> New functionality is added, old functionality is kept in (albeit
> usually deprecated) to maintain backwards compatability.
>
Ok, that's great.

So I won't have to spend time trying to remember how I got the stuff
working.


>
>>Oh, and of course - any neat new toys I should look at? :-)
>
>
> First thing I noticed was the new /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 script.
>

Neil Koozer wrote:
>
> The others have covered it; I just thought I would tell you of my favorite
> newbee help request... He had gzipped everything in the /etc directory!
> Think about that one.
>
Heh.

I still think it was funny the way me and a friend searched around for
hours on the first day I installed Linux (slackware, of course) for the
way to get into the GUI...

'startx' was, of course, the solution.
Luckily, I did manage to find the answer on the web.

On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 11:53:43 GMT, Stanislaw Flatto <compaid@shoalhaven.net.au>
wrote:
> Soooo "To nine-one or not nine-one, this is THE question?"

I have different policies for different machines. For servers, I'm a
firm believer in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" (dustpuppy is still
running Slackware 8.0 with quite a few security fixes & a few upgrades
for new features here & there) and, for my workstation, I tend to
upgrade fairly frequently, just to try out new packages/programs.


--
Simon <simon@no-dns-yet.org.uk> **** GPG: F4A23C69
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty."
- Douglas Adams