On Wed, 17 Oct 2001, Tim Howe wrote:
>Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, but I can't seem to find any
>information on bringing Slackware 8.0 up to date... It seems to be 4
>months old, so there must have been updates since it's release (I
>assume), but I can't find a methodology for updating the system. I'm
>used to a src tree, but I assume Slack updates in some binary fashion?
Yes, Slackware has binary packages (they're the things ending in .tgz in
the "slakware" directory on the CD).
The basic tools for managing Slackware packages are installpkg and removepkg.
These do pretty much what you would expect, using pretty much the syntax
you would expect:
installpkg filename.tgz
removepkg filename (note no .tgz in this command)
There's also upgradepkg, which installs a new package and then removes any
files that were part of the old package but not part of the new package.
upgradepkg filename
or, if the old and new packages have different names,
upgradepkg oldname%newname
If you want a menu interface (text only), use pkgtool.
See the man pages for more more information. (No, really. Read the man
pages. They'll tell you some things I've omitted, like how to avoid getting
your configuration files clobbered.)
- Neil Parker
