Hey all. I have a partition dedicated to Slackware 7.1. I'd like to upgrade to 8.1, as I haven't been keeping up to date with all the latest. What do you think is the best route to go here? Should I just re-install over my previous build? If not, is there an easy way to upgrade?

I don't really have much that I'd like to keep, so a re-install is definitely an option. However, there are two things in particular:

1) It took me forever to get my nVidia GeForce2-based graphics card to work with Slack 7.1 and XFree86. Will this be a problem with Slack 8.1?

2) It also took me a bit of doing to get PPPoE working (I used Roaring Penguin's PPPoE client, and had to compile a network driver for my NIC, among other things). How is PPPoE support in the latest kernel?

If these two problems are no longer an issue, then I think re-installing is a no-brainer. But I still consider myself a newbie, so I could be wrong. :-)

Can someone give me advice on this?

Thanks!

Carl

I didn't have much of a problem with the roaring penguin under slack 7.1, but I was using that distro long after it was old just to eek performance out of an older machine, so I was probably using a much better build of the RP, and even better exist now.

The NIC depends, for instance I had a lot of issues with my tulip card under 2.2.x kernel based distros (of which 7.1 runs 2.2.16, right?), but zero problems under Slack 8.0 and 8.1(or at least the past four hours, wheee!!!!)

I have an ATI graphics card, so I don't know much about having to deal with outside of X support like the Nvidias. From what I've read its pretty easy to hack the modules into an 4.x.x based XFConfig and a headache top get them working right under 3.3.6, so you should be alright.

The base kernel, bare.i, has support for reiser, ext3 and ext2 built in, so if you can shuffle all your stuff onto one partition to save it and then install around that partition, it'll mount the part and you can re-shuffle from there.

As for the install, its still the same old install... only it asked during config if I wanted to send it some special kernel parameters and suggested /dev/hdX=ide-scsi, wow, Slack got burner friendly.

Of course, I'm going to see if the luster fades, I doubt it...

Cheers,

Finegan

Go for the reinstall, geforce cards are a snap to set up with the latest nvidia drivers and xfree86-4.2.0 and there is a roaring penguin pppoe slackware package in /slackware-8.1/extra/rp-pppoe-3.3