[GTALUG] Hints for upgrading

[William Park]

I just upgraded from Slackware-14.1 to 14.2.  That's almost 3 years in
between. :-)  Here are what I did or have...

1. Single root filesystem /dev/sda1.  For boot drive, you need MBR, but
you can lump everything into one partition.  When upgrading,
    - before "install", move all the old directories into /.old
    - during "install", don't partition or format /dev/sda (obviously)
    - after "install", copy files from /.old/etc to /etc, file by file
      but only when necessary (more later).

2. For non-boot harddisks, use the entire harddisk without partition,
like /dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdb1.  Yes, you can format EXT4 or BTRFS
on the whole disk.

3. You can't just copy blindly from /.old/etc to /etc, because
formats may be different, new options may be introduced, etc.

    - obviously, if files are the same, don't copy.
	cd /.old/etc
	find . -type f | while read f; do diff -q $f /etc/$f && echo $f; done
	find . -type f | while read f; do diff -q $f /etc/$f && rm $f; done

    - after that, diff and merge into /etc manually, file by file,
	vimdiff X /etc/X

4. If you plan to move the harddisk to another machine (like I do), then
use MBR.  Problem with EFI is that it writes the boot entry in BIOS.
Well, on a new motherboard, boot entry is not there, so you can't boot.
You have to dig into EFI shell, and manually select your .efi.

-- 
William