I run 9.1 with KDE on desktop machines for a book publishing business.

I sure wish there was an easy and TOTALLY foolproof (yeah, I'm a fool) way to
go from one version to the next without doing a clean "from scratch" install.
I will have to install and/or configure:

phpMyAdmin
Apache
PHP
Crossover Office (and install Word)
Moneydance
Open Office
MySQL databases
Home dir files (yeah, should have been on own partition)
FireFox and bookmarks
CUPS printers and settings
Email and newsgroups accounts (Kmail/Knode)
Email address book
Jpilot data
fstab entries for camera and hda
Realplayer

.... and probably stuff I have forgotten. I don't know how anyone can do this
with every six-month release and still run the business (and it has to be
done on other machine(s) as well.)

I console myself saying that it wouldn't be any different with Windows.
However I believe the Mac OS-X has a easier migration path. Not sure.

I know there are so-called "methods" to upgrade with swaret and that for 10.0
P.V. published a "how to" but from what I've read, neither of these are
foolproof.. and are almost as time-consuming in getting the xxx.conf.new
files changes into the "old" files.

I'd sure like to run the "new stuff" but who (running a business) as time to
upgrade? And with the fear of being slammed, is there a distro that DOES have
a slam-dunk upgrade methodology? Debian with apt-get maybe? Just curious.
Slackware has been very stable for us (compared to Mandrake) and we would not
leave for light and transient reasons.

Al C.

"Al. C" <no.spam.acanton@take.out.adams-blake.no.spam.com> writes:

>phpMyAdmin
>Apache
>PHP
>Crossover Office (and install Word)
>Moneydance
>Open Office
>MySQL databases
>Home dir files (yeah, should have been on own partition)
>FireFox and bookmarks
>CUPS printers and settings
>Email and newsgroups accounts (Kmail/Knode)
>Email address book
>Jpilot data
>fstab entries for camera and hda
>Realplayer

Enlightened use of partitioning, automounting, nfs, & servers can go a
long way to reducing the problem.

& then there is the argument about adopting every release - is it
really necessary? By "really" I mean a functional necessity, not a "I
want the latest gee-whiz poobah" thing.

--
<> Robert Geer & Donna Tomky | |||| We sure |||| <>
<> bgeer@xmission.com | == == find it == == <>
<> dtomky@xmission.com | == == enchanting == == <>
<> Albuquerque, NM USA | |||| here! |||| <>

bgeer wrote:

> Enlightened use of partitioning, automounting, nfs, & servers can go a
> long way to reducing the problem.

And generous documentation and backups. You could even do your upgrades
without worrying about automounting and NFS (each of which are their own
cans of worms), having made good use of partitioning, backups, and
created good (electronic) documentation.

Most of my time during "upgrades" is spent copying and pasting from
transcripts of previous installations ...

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sylvain Robitaille syl@alcor.concordia.ca

Systems analyst Concordia University
Instructional & Information Technology Montreal, Quebec, Canada
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Al. C wrote:
> I run 9.1 with KDE on desktop machines for a book publishing business.
>
> I sure wish there was an easy and TOTALLY foolproof (yeah, I'm a fool) way to
> go from one version to the next without doing a clean "from scratch" install.
> I will have to install and/or configure:
>
> phpMyAdmin
> Apache
> PHP
> Crossover Office (and install Word)
> Moneydance
> Open Office
> MySQL databases
> Home dir files (yeah, should have been on own partition)
> FireFox and bookmarks
> CUPS printers and settings
> Email and newsgroups accounts (Kmail/Knode)
> Email address book
> Jpilot data
> fstab entries for camera and hda
> Realplayer
>
> ... and probably stuff I have forgotten. I don't know how anyone can do this
> with every six-month release and still run the business (and it has to be
> done on other machine(s) as well.)
>
> I console myself saying that it wouldn't be any different with Windows.
> However I believe the Mac OS-X has a easier migration path. Not sure.
>
> I know there are so-called "methods" to upgrade with swaret and that for 10.0
> P.V. published a "how to" but from what I've read, neither of these are
> foolproof.. and are almost as time-consuming in getting the xxx.conf.new
> files changes into the "old" files.
>
> I'd sure like to run the "new stuff" but who (running a business) as time to
> upgrade? And with the fear of being slammed, is there a distro that DOES have
> a slam-dunk upgrade methodology? Debian with apt-get maybe? Just curious.
> Slackware has been very stable for us (compared to Mandrake) and we would not
> leave for light and transient reasons.
>
> Al C.
>
>
>
>

There is an upgrade howto on the root of slackware distribution. This
explain how to upgrade by hand without using any third party tool. I
think this is relatively fast and foolproof for the Slackware packages
itself but maybe not for third party tools you have installed. I suggest
you to do an entire backup of your drive (or your partitiuon) first so
that you can restore it in case something goes wrong.

Debian has an automatic upgrade method but you have still to decide if
you want replace the configuration files or not (I think they will ask
for each configuration file). This method will not be fullproof for
thing you have installed by hand (although you have nearly everything in
Debian). Be aware that you will have to upgrade to "testing" (the
"stable" distribution is very old: about 30 mounth; much older than your
slackware 9.2) which has no security update.

Red hat a version for the enterprise: Red Hat Entreprise. For this
distribution itself you have to pay for a support contract (one by
server). You can try howeber: http://www.centos.org/, it is the Red Hat
Entreprise recompiled where all Red Hat trademark have been removed.
They recompile also the security updates given by Red Hat (this is
perfectly legal: Red Hat is redistribuable if you remove the trademarks:
this is not obvious but they have done it).

Olive

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Al. C <no.spam.acanton@take.out.adams-blake.no.spam.com> trolled:

> I'd sure like to run the "new stuff" but who (running a business)
> as time to upgrade? And with the fear of being slammed, is there
> a distro that DOES have a slam-dunk upgrade methodology? Debian
> with apt-get maybe? Just curious. Slackware has been very stable
> for us (compared to Mandrake) and we would not leave for light
> and transient reasons.

Why do you even need to upgrade? Are you sure that your reasons
for upgrading are not "light and transient?"

cordially, as always,

rm

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Al. C <no.spam.acanton@take.out.adams-blake.no.spam.com> wrote:
> I run 9.1 with KDE on desktop machines for a book publishing business.
>
> I sure wish there was an easy and TOTALLY foolproof (yeah, I'm a fool)
> way to go from one version to the next without doing a clean "from
> scratch" install. I will have to install and/or configure:
>
> phpMyAdmin
> Apache
> PHP
> Crossover Office (and install Word)
> Moneydance
> Open Office
> MySQL databases
> Home dir files (yeah, should have been on own partition)

Yes, you now know why. I have / and /home on different harddisk, and
/usr/local symlinked to /home/local. You can use different partition of
same harddisk, if no other options are available. Then, I do
incremental backup of / regularly to /home/root/backup. For example, if
/etc/fstab was modified, then it would be backed up to
/home/root/backup/etc/fstab. This way, I only need to backup /home
partition.

For restore, you need to examine what you are restoring. If an
application changed its format in or location of their configuration
file, then no pacakge manager can help you.

> FireFox and bookmarks
> CUPS printers and settings
> Email and newsgroups accounts (Kmail/Knode)
> Email address book
> Jpilot data
> fstab entries for camera and hda
> Realplayer

--
William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca>, Toronto, Canada
Slackware Linux -- because I can type.

bgeer wrote:

>
> Enlightened use of partitioning, automounting, nfs, & servers can go a
> long way to reducing the problem.
>

True, but that has a complexity all its own and I wonder if the trade-off of
this vs. an upgrade every 1.5 to 2 years is worth it.

> & then there is the argument about adopting every release - is it
> really necessary?**By*"really"*I*mean*a*functional*necess ity,*not*a*"I
> want the latest gee-whiz poobah" thing.

I'm glad you said that. Believe it or not our little biz runs pretty well on
9.1. There are some new KDE things we might like to try. On the whole it's a
"we really should have the latest stuff" kind of mindset.

Really. How many of you are still running 8 trough 9.1? Anyone?

As an aside, this is why mega-corporations like the ERP paradigm which is a
fancy acronym where ALL your applications are by one vendor and integrated
together.... as SAP does, and which is why Oracle wanted Peoplesoft. You
don't have a hodge-podge of 3rd party applications and it makes upgrading
easier as it's all "managed" by the vendor. I'm not pitching or endorsing the
ERP approach, but it does have a lot of proponents out there in mega-corp
land.

And as another aside this is why we (our company) likes to use as many
web-apps as we can (and why we wrote our own.... www.jaya123.com !!!) We do
all our payables via online banking, all our payroll via www.paycycle.com,
our taxes via www.taxact.com, our investing via Ameritrade, our faxing
through a fax service, and so on. We love the thin-client approach... a
bullet-proof OS like Slackware Linux giving us access to the outside world.
We're not Linux gurus. We're just trying to scratch out a living in the book
biz and the web-service biz and upgrading from scratch is a major PITA for
little people like us who don't have the staff (or who don't want to spend
the money for consultants) to do it. To you guys who re-install Slackware
every two weeks, it's a piece of cake. But to "real people" it's not :-)

Still, I really would like to run 10.1. But I don't know why :-)

Al C.

Al. C wrote:

[Snipped]

> Al C.

Welcome to the "If it ain't broke, upgrade!" club.
Maybe it is time to use the part that "homo sapiens, sapiens" is so
proud of?
And every "idiot proof" procedure is a "petri dish" for producing better
idiots.

But there must be some way out of such mess.
When you find it, shout "Eureka!".

Have fun.

Stanislaw
Slack user from Ulladulla.

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In alt.os.linux.slackware, Al. C dared to utter,
> Really. How many of you are still running 8 trough 9.1? Anyone?

Until I consolidated some servers around a few weeks back to reduce the
ammount of machines doing varius tasks I still had a 9.1 server. Until
my previous server died and required a re-install (yes, I had backups
of the data) it was running 9.0. Currently my company's mail and web
services are on a 10.0 machine. I see no reason to upgrade. In fact, of
all the Slackware boxen I ahve out there, only one is running 10.1
right now. I've many customers still running 10.0, most are still
running 9.1, and a few run 9.0 (in a two-node failover heartbeat
cluster to boot!) and I've no plans to upgrade them. I keep an eye on
security fixes and make sure the machines are properly hardened before
going into place as I rarely ever look at them after they're installed
at my client's site. It never ceases to amaze me how the more time you
spend up front doing things right on a server the less time you ever
have to spend on it again. The vast majority of my support work is on
broken clients. Server problems are almost always old, failing
hardware.

> As an aside, this is why mega-corporations like the ERP paradigm which is a
> fancy acronym where ALL your applications are by one vendor and integrated
> together.... as SAP does, and which is why Oracle wanted Peoplesoft. You
> don't have a hodge-podge of 3rd party applications and it makes upgrading
> easier as it's all "managed" by the vendor. I'm not pitching or endorsing the
> ERP approach, but it does have a lot of proponents out there in mega-corp
> land.

I can see why that's tempting, but to me that's really a recipe for
disaster and violates all common sense. When you hand over control of
your infrastructure to some third party; you're taking a very big risk.
Handing the keys to your business's network to some one else is, IMO, a
bad move if you can afford to do the work in house. In house people
know you, know exactly what you need, are generally easier to get in
touch with or strong-arm into doing what you want, and are easily
replaced just by phasing out bad workers and phasing in new (hopefully
good) workers.

> Still, I really would like to run 10.1. But I don't know why :-)

My advice, if 9.1 is doing all you need it to do; don't worry about the
upgrade.

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

> bgeer wrote:
>
>>
>> Enlightened use of partitioning, automounting, nfs, & servers can go a
>> long way to reducing the problem.
>>
>
> True, but that has a complexity all its own and I wonder if the trade-off
> of this vs. an upgrade every 1.5 to 2 years is worth it.

bgeer makes it sound technical, it's not (I'm not sure why he listed nfs and
automounting, that's overkill for the average user's needs). It's just a
matter of keeping your /home dir on a separate partition and keeping a copy
of /etc. That'd cover ~80% of what you listed (kmail settings, fstab, etc).

The rest is more a case of you should know enough to deal with it. Things
like mysql (or Firebird, or PostgreSQL, or ...) databases, you should know
how to backup and restore them anyway, it should be part of your routine
(it's generally a good idea to restore your DBs from backups now and again
to make sure they're all working, you don't want to find your backup system
is a useless as the HD that just died with the live system on it).

Installing apps that aren't standard with slack tends to be a good time to
get up to date with their latest version (much like upgrading slack its
self), so that's no big problem either.

> Still, I really would like to run 10.1. But I don't know why :-)

Your hands shaking as you type eh? Need some Slackerette(tm) patches? ;-)

Blumf

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