I’ve been running Slackware-current ( the development version of Slackware ) for probably close to 5 years now. For the most part, it’s a pretty uneventful stream of upgrades however, every once in a while things get interesting.
The March 1 update is massive, has taken a month to release and includes around 465 updated packages. There are 2 main reasons for this:
- Xorg has been upgraded to 1.7.5
- a new version libpng is included which required the rebuild of a large number of dependant packages ( 13? )
I had some issues as follows …
On reboot I got ‘undefined symbols’ and ‘unknown module format’ when loading some modules. My NVidia binary driver would not load with a message the same as above. I had not upgraded the kernel so this was all a bit strange.
First step was to get a new NVidia driver ( 195.36.08 ) which installed fine but the driver still refused to load. Then I thought that a kernel package may have been installed erroneously so I upgraded all of them. Still no go.
To the LinuxQuestions forum where I gathered that there may have been an issue with a kernel config option ( CONFIG_PREEMPT ) in this particular kernel. The fix was straightforward – rebuild and install the kernel with the existing config file:
cp /boot/config-huge-2.6.33 /usr/src/linux-2.6.33/.config && cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.33 && make && make modules_install && cp arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz && lilo && echo “blacklist nouveau” >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf && telinit 6
There was also an issue with the libgmp library which was updated today and fixed those issues.
Some other upgrades/changes:
- device-mapper is now included in the lvm2 package
- gzip security issue
- kernel 2.6.33
- kde 4.3.5
- openssl security fixes in 0.9.8m
- bash 4.1
I’m running AlienBob’s kde 4.4.x packages and hopefully he’ll have an updated ( to 4.4.1 ) set soon. All in all an interesting time however this is dev so it’s to be expected. Th problem is current is generally so stable that this is actually unexpected. No problems either way.
Thanks to Pat, Eric, Robby and all the rest.
