Just finished upgrading (using slackpkg/slackpkg+) to 14.2 on a collection of dual boot laptops. All went well for two of the beasties, but the first one I tried, a Thinkpad Yoga, didn't fare so well. In trying to figure out the order of things, I ended up downgrading the multilib installation and since then I can't even log in. What I'm wondering is if there's a way to re-run the installpkg routine using ROOT= to point the installation to a mounted filesystem. In other words, can I boot to a stick, mount the drive and re-do the upgrade.

Also, regarding blacklisting 'alien' and 'SBo' packages, what's the point? If I have packages (aside from system and multilib related ones) from those sources, don't I want them upgraded as well?

Also, if Eric happens to see this, I might suggest that the upgrade instructions on the wiki have a warning earlier on regarding the multilib upgrade. It now comes at the end of the piece, after a careful explanation of upgrading a plain-vanilla install. Us multilib types could use a heads up that we need to branch off to upgrade the multilib versions (glibc, etc.) before proceeding with the 'install-new, upgrade-all' steps.

Thanks,
Geoff.

You can simply boot off a USB stick, mount your root partition and bind mount /sys /dev and /proc to the mounted partition, chroot the mounted partition, then install any and all packages as normal.

However, you can also not chroot and just run ROOT=/mnt upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new /location/to/packages.t?z, but personally, I always opt for the chroot as I think it allows for fewer mistakes.

As to the instructions, multilib is not officially supported on Slackware, so it does make sense to cover the vanilla usage first. But, even if you did just the vanilla instructions, it would just knock out your multilib as the required multilib packages would be overwritten by official pure 64bit packages. Then you could reinstall multilib just as you did the first time. It seems like what broke your system was installing multilib packages that aren't for your version of Slackware.

In regards to the blacklist, alien is recommended to be blacklisted if you're not using slackpkg+ to ensure it doesn't get removed when running slackpkg clean-system. However, if you have slackpkg+ and have it set up to use Eric's repo, then you'd not want to blacklist alien, otherwise it won't find any of his packages. Since slackpkg and slackpkg+ doesn't support SBo, if you don't have SBo blacklisted, running clean-package will propose to remove all SBo packages, potentially cluttering up the stock packages that need to be removed.

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I removed multilib from the 14.1 system before doing the upgrade.
So I modified slackpkgplus.conf to not have multilib. Then I did upgrade-all on 14.1 and then I followed with the upgrade to 14.2.

But then my setup was borked by running out of disk space.

Teeheehee. Yeah, I suppose I _am_ over the adrenaline rush of watching an upgrade go horribly awry. Some day I'll have to tell you my 'rm -f *' story...

bassmadrigal, thanks, once more, for coming to my aid. You may recall I was trying to get the Yoga wifi adapter to work, which occasioned the upgrade. Intel notes there is kernel support for the module in the 4 series.

The slackpkg/slackpkg+ combo is what I've been using for awhile and, like many other things, has lagged in the documentation dept. Everyone seems to have left the blacklist comment alone with no mention of the irrelevance of it under slackpg+. The docs for installing/configuring slackpkg+ _do_ mention it, but it hasn't made it to the upgrade page on the wiki. (I should stop whining and dig out my old userid and make the edits. Hmm.) Heck, the reason I added 'plus' was to keep on top of Eric's changelog.

One other thing while I have you here. I noticed there's a new 'rc.modules' installed w/ 14.2 and it did not, as in versions past, create a soft link to a version-specific 'rc.modules.' Is this a change?

riwi, where are you running out of space? The caching of packages, or on the install/upgrade? If your system had a prior version with enough space how would an upgrade eat up that much more? Have you removed the packages from older versions that no longer need to be lying around?

I did not notice any errors during the packages install. I managed to edit lilo.conf and run it without complaints about disk space. Then after reboot I saw it could not find my bootdrive, I booted from DVD and mounted the drive and saw 100% usage. I am going to install from scratch in the 30GB partition. My other PCs also have 30GB system partitions so I am curious to see how that goes. Else I have to resize them before upgrading.

I think we've all had those...

I think the issue is that slackpkg is the official way to upgrade packages from a mirror. slackpkg+ is not official and is not officially supported in any capacity. This is why those default blacklist items remain as they are within slackpkg. As for the wiki, as you implied, it is editable by anyone (with an account, that has to be requested since registrations are closed), so if you could dig out your username and make the changes, I'm sure others would appreciate it.

Yes, this is an intended change. From the 14 DEC 2015 changelog entry: