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Finally Uprading to Slackware64 14.2... Maybe


V.T. Eric Layton

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V.T. Eric Layton

Well, I'm getting aggravated with old FF 45.9 and Flash. I'm also getting aggravated with some other odds and ends things with Slack64-14.1. It's way past time to upgrade to the newest version, which isn't really that new anymore... 30 June 2016. Yeeesh! I wonder when Pat V. is going to finally release 15???

 

So, I'm seriously considering upgrading for the new year. Some time in the next few days I may work myself up to it. I have a few days' worth of work to do once it's installed, though. This is the reason I hate upgrading so much and have put this off for so long.

 

We'll see how it goes. I might lose my motivation and not do a darn thing. Time will tell... I'm downloading the .iso right now. I guess that's a start, huh?

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35 minutes ago, V.T. Eric Layton said:

Well, I'm getting aggravated with old FF 45.9 and Flash. I'm also getting aggravated with some other odds and ends things with Slack64-14.1. It's way past time to upgrade to the newest version, which isn't really that new anymore... 30 June 2016. Yeeesh! I wonder when Pat V. is going to finally release 15???

 

So, I'm seriously considering upgrading for the new year. Some time in the next few days I may work myself up to it. I have a few days' worth of work to do once it's installed, though. This is the reason I hate upgrading so much and have put this off for so long.

 

We'll see how it goes. I might lose my motivation and not do a darn thing. Time will tell... I'm downloading the .iso right now. I guess that's a start, huh?

i'll believe this when you post images proving it. you think we were all born yesterday?

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If you get aggravated enough, you'll install v 14. I find that is the catalyst to get me moving in a lot of situations. :hysterical:

As I get older, I don't take to changes well but enough annoyances can get me to change.

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V.T. Eric Layton

My "announcement" posting that I'm repeating on three or four places that I visit online every day so that folks will not panic if I drop out of Internet existence for a while.

 

======

 

*** JUST SO YOU KNOW ***

 

Well, it's cold outside today and I have no intention of leaving the house for anything, so it's a perfect day to do a long-delayed upgrade to the operating system (Slackware Linux) on my main computer (ericsbane07). If all goes well, you won't even miss me. If not, then there may be some delays, as I have no other means to access the Internet these days than with this computer.

 

Wish me luck! :)

 

======

My first step this morning was to mirror my current system onto my backup drive. After that, I burned the Slack DVD and now have it in the drive ready to go.

 

A few years back, I successfully upgraded one of my laptops from 13.37 to 14.1 using Pat V's method that can be found on the .iso. It was pretty involved, but in the long run, it was easier than a fresh install, as it left much of my system intact while upgrading everything to the next version. I'm going to try this method first today. If that crashes and burns, well... then I'll just do the fresh install. It's not like I haven't done any of this poop before. As I've aged, though, I just prefer the "easy" ways to do things. ;)

 

As it says above... wish me luck!

 

Toodles for now.... hopefully, not for too long, though.

 

~E.

 

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V.T. Eric Layton
8 minutes ago, zlim said:

I don't take to changes well but enough annoyances can get me to change.

 

HAHA! That's EXACTLY how I feel about it. The older we get, the more we get like cats; they HATE change. ;)

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V.T. Eric Layton

My o' my... what a pain in the rectal orifice this was. No wonder I was avoiding it for so long. Let me tells ya'... #apt-get dist-upgrade would have been a H3LL of a lot easier. Ah well, if I wanted something easy, I would've stuck with Ubuntu back in the day. But no.... I'm a SLACKER through and through. The only way I could be more masochistic would be to run Gentoo. ;)

 

Anyway, it's up. It's running. I've got a couple days' worth of tweaking, customizing, removing and/or updating old apps, and some odds and ends polishing up here and there; it's running, though. It's RUNNING!!!

 

Oh, and EGADS, MAN! The new Firefox and Thunderbird are YOOOGLY with their carpy themes and sharp-edge square tabs. BLECH! Who designed this carp, anyway? He must have been an artless sadist.

 

Tired now. More to come...

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V.T. Eric Layton

Well, one cool thing...

 

If I find that I can't stand this ugly FF, I just installed Chromium and it didn't explode when I started it. YAY! I haven't been able to get Chromium to run on the old Slack installation for a couple years now. It would just crash my x-server every time I installed it and tried to run it. All's well, now... it seems. I'll spend some time tomorrow customizing that baby! :)

 

The other REALLY GOOD NEWS was that I was able to run the new Thunderbird with my old T-bird profile, so all my stuff was there and still works. BIG YAY!

 

 

 

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securitybreach
10 hours ago, V.T. Eric Layton said:

Oh, and EGADS, MAN! The new Firefox and Thunderbird are YOOOGLY with their carpy themes and sharp-edge square tabs. BLECH! Who designed this carp, anyway? He must have been an artless sadist.

 

Firefox comes with a dark theme as well that looks great. I didn't even bother to download a different one as the default dark theme looks great.

 

Also, good to see you come into this decade.. B)

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V.T. Eric Layton

Well, I'm not totally happy, but I'll survive.

 

- Xfce 4.12 has and UGLY default theme, too. I guess UGLY is the new thing nowadays. If I wanted ugly, I'd have just stayed with the green phosphor monitor and CLI.

 

- Chromium is UGLY, too. Also, it's just TOO INTERTWINED with Google these days, so I'll probably not be using it too much.

 

- I can now see HTML5 videos with FF. YAY!

 

- I fixed GUI font and page fonts (in FF and TB) with an "about:config" tweak that I found which requires you to increase the variable on this entry: layout.css.devPixelsPerPx. That made it a little better on these old eyes.

 

- Nouveau drivers would not give me my monitor's native resolution (1680X1050), so I had to install Nvidia drivers. All's well now.

 

- My Orage Clock (panel clock in Xfce) will not function in transparent mode. Evidently, it's a bug that has not be resolved in 4.12 because Orage is not being supported anymore. Oh, well. Nothing is forever. I'll just have to deal with it.

 

- AND A BIG YAY because since all my VPN setting were in my /home directory and the Network Manager did not change any settings when it updated, my VPN works fine and dandy without me having to do anything.

 

- I do have one networking bugaboo that I need to resolve: when booting up and initiating X, my network starts "eth0", but that's not my active network. eth0 only lets me ping my router, but no external route. My actual network is another one that the VPN also rides on. I have to manually choose it now, but I'll check inet1.conf and other places to see where that setting got buggered up. Shouldn't be too difficult to fix.

 

Anyway, I'm sure there are a few other things here and there that I'll need to deal with, but all-in-all, it's working. That's really all I care about. I'm not much of a nerd these days. I'm just happy when the carp works. Yesterday was probably the longest session (11 hours) of sitting at this desk in front of the soul-sucking box since the last time I updated/upgraded ('15 or '16, I think).

 

The lady-friend is coming over this weekend, so I'm just going to forget about all this techie stuff, get inebriated, relax, and have some fun. We're going flea-marketing tomorrow in the early AM. That's always pretty fun. :)

 

Everyone have a wonderful weekend-before-Christmas!

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V.T. Eric Layton

OK, pretty much everything is as I like it to be. I'm currently upgrading my SlackBuild packages. Should be done with that after just a couple more... VLC and LibreOffice.

 

YAY! It was a PITA, but not as bad as I thought it would be. The "upgrade" method provided by Pat V. in the README on the .iso was much easier than a clean install would have been. The only issue with Pat's upgrade is that I had to check/modify all my /etc/rc.d permissions, but that wasn't too bad, really. I know what they all need to be, so a few minutes in CLI had them all set as needed.

 

I still have the problem with Network Manager firing up eth0 instead of my named network, but it functions fine. I just have to choose my named network once eth0 is established at startx; just one extra click does it.

 

And that's that.

 

Everyone have a wonderful weekend! 2019 is shot in the rear end, it seems. I think 2020 will be my year to hit that lottery jackpot. I sure hope it happens in the early part of the year, though. ;)

 

Later...

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V.T. Eric Layton

Okee-dokee...

 

Got that new Slack pretty much how it needs to be. I'll be mirroring it onto the older 14.1 that's currently on my backup drive. I won't be going back for anything now. It's full steam ahead. I'll just have to wait around till Pat V. comes out with Slack 15 before I have to do all this carp again. ;)

 

Oh, goody! Screenshots:

 

Slackware64-14.2 on ericsbane07 w/ Xfce4.12 DE

 

kbwvIk0.png

 

Firefox 68.3.0 ESR

 

Ki6jhjf.png

 

Thunderbird 68.3.1

 

49gbTbn.png

 

 

 

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Nothing wrong with old email addresses that still work. My juno is probably from 1996; years before I had broadband internet access. I'd dial in, the email would download and I'd read it. I'd compose emails, dial back in and it would all be sent. It didn't tie up the phone line. My yahoo address is from 1999. I had to get a 2nd email address because we were going to be in Australia for 5 weeks and I couldn't dial into juno to get and send mail. I needed some sort of webmail account.

 

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securitybreach

I still have them around (yahoo, hotmail, aim, etc.) but they all turned into Spam factories, especially yahoo as their filters turned into absolute garbage. Nowadays, I only use mail from Riseup. I stopped using all google services (besides on my phone) after last year's Google+ closure. After so many great products cancelled over the years, that was the last straw. If there was a third option for smartphones and such, I would drop android too.

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V.T. Eric Layton

@zlim... Yes, my Yahoo is also from '99. I think I still have a Juno email, too, but I haven't logged in their in over a decade.

 

@securitybreach... That's weird about SPAM from Yahoo. I know that my SPAM folder over on their webmail gets filled up, but I never see any SPAM make to to my Thunderbird from Yahoo... or any of my other accounts, either.

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V.T. Eric Layton
On 12/20/2019 at 11:22 AM, V.T. Eric Layton said:

- I do have one networking bugaboo that I need to resolve: when booting up and initiating X, my network starts "eth0", but that's not my active network. eth0 only lets me ping my router, but no external route. My actual network is another one that the VPN also rides on. I have to manually choose it now, but I'll check inet1.conf and other places to see where that setting got buggered up. Shouldn't be too difficult to fix.

 

AND YAY! I finally got this fixed. The issue was that my init script rc.inetd.conf got overwritten in the upgrade, so I had to go in there and find out why eth0 became the primary network connection instead of my named network. It was just a matter of adding this variable, IFNAME[0]="my-network-name", to the eth0 configuration.

 

I LOVE sysVinit; so easy-peasy! :)

 

 

 

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securitybreach
8 hours ago, V.T. Eric Layton said:

@zlim... Yes, my Yahoo is also from '99. I think I still have a Juno email, too, but I haven't logged in their in over a decade.

 

@securitybreach... That's weird about SPAM from Yahoo. I know that my SPAM folder over on their webmail gets filled up, but I never see any SPAM make to to my Thunderbird from Yahoo... or any of my other accounts, either.

 

That is because of thunderbird. Like you said, the spam folder on their webmail is filled up. Well I kept getting ones that made it past their filters until I gave up.

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V.T. Eric Layton

I LOVE my T-bird. The day that T-bird is gone or these email providers don't allow remote access will be my last day on the Internets.

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V.T. Eric Layton

Out-of-the-box T-bird is BORING! Mine is highly customized. I protect my T-Bird (and FF) profile very well... Backup, Backup, Backup... in numerous places.

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