I thought there might be some interest in how I did my Slackware upgrade from version 4.0 to 7.1 while switching from an old machine to a newer one. If not, you know where the "d" key is! Old machine - Slackware 4.0 on an 8GB hard disk, plus an unused 800MB second hard disk. It had an internal DoublEtalk card and modem, an AWE64 sound card with alsa drivers version 4.1. New machine - 10GB hard disk unpartitioned, external modem and Doubletalk, sound card is sblive. Vendor knows nothing about Linux but trusts me to figure things out. <HA> The plan - use the old system to download three files from the speakup ftp area: Joe Norton's Slackware kernels "dtlk.dsk" for the old system and "ltlk.dsk" for the new one, plus "color.gz" for Slackware 7.1. Prepare two boot disks and one root disk and label them with braille! Test them. There was SOME trouble making the LTLK.DSK boot disk work on the old system, which was not solved by supplying lilo parameters. The problem turned out to be that the bios either did not initialize the serial port to which the doubletalk was attached, or else it initialized it to the wrong values. The way to make the LTLK.DSK boot disk work during tests on the old system was to bring the system up in DOS first, then do a soft reset (ctrl-alt-delete) to the boot disk. Whew! That was a close one. Be sure to ask Rich at Glenco to see that the bios initializes the serial ports to 9600,n,8,1 before delivering the new machine, since that is an operation I cannot perform by myself. Next - create a directory on the 8GB disk called "slakware" and use "wget" to download a mirror of the corresponding directory on the Slackware site. No kidding! That was About 368 megabytes and it ran for 46 hours, but it completed successfully and I then had the Slackware 7.1 installation directory on my old machine's hard disk. Next - use the DTLK.DSK boot disk and COLOR.GZ to install 7.1 onto the small 800MB hard disk. I created a 64MB swap partition and the balance of the disk in a single Linux native partition, and the installation went okay. I did not create a boot disk or a rescue disk, nor did I install lilo with this installation. Not ready for that yet. Instead I copied the new kernel to a DOS partition on the 8GB drive, from which I created an unusual boot disk which you might be interested in. Boot disk - I created a bootable DOS diskette and put on it a copy of loadlin and the new kernel from the 7.1 installation. I created a batch file called "go.bat" that invoked loadlin WITH the proper parameters to reboot the new system. That way I could easily change the "hdb" to "hda" when the second hard disk would later become the first one! Test this concept - it worked fine. I could boot with the DOS disk, get past the date and time prompts, and type "go" to bring up the new Linux system from the /dev/hdb disk. Next - The plan is to take the old system to the vendor, who will (1) take the primary disk from it and install it as the secondary disk in the new system; move the secondary disk to the primary one on the old system; move the HP scanner interface card from the old system to the new one; and install a network card in the old system as well as the new one. To prepare for those steps, I modified the "go.bat" file to refer to /dev/hda instead of /dev/hdb, and changed all references in the file /etc/fstab from /dev/hdb to /dev/hda. Those were the only changes necessary to anticipate moving the secondary disk to the primary position. Later when I got the old machine back, I used the DOS diskette to get the Linux system started, and then installed lilo to go instantly into Linux (no more DOS on this baby!) and created a couple of system-specific boot disks. Everything worked like a charm. Next - When the new system arrived, it had an unformaTTED 10gb HARD DISK IN THE PRIMARY POSITION AND MY OLD 8gb DISK IN THE SECONDARY POSITION, AND OF COURSE THAT 8gb DISK STILL HAD THE /SLAKWARE DIRECTORY ON ONE OF ITS PARTITIONS. tHE INSTALLATION WAS THEREFORE A BREEZE - rICH REMEMBERED TO FIX THE BIOS SETUP, SO THE ltlk.dsk DISK FOUND THE EXPERNAL dOUBLETALK JUST FINE, AND i USED color.gz TO PARTITION THE NEW DISK AND INSTALL sLACKWARE 7.1 ON IT FROM THE FILES ON THE SECONDARY DISK. tHE REST OF THE DETAILS HERE ARE NOT SPECIAL AT ALL - i HAVE HAD THE USUAL AWKWARDNESSES GETTING TO KNOW MY EXTERNAL MODEM AND FIGURING OUT HOW TO USE THE NEW SOUND CARD, MUCH OF WHICH i HAVE SOUGHT HELP WITH FROM LIST MEMBERS. i HAVE DECIDED TO UPGRADE EVERY PIECE OF OBSOLETE SOFTWARE i COULD THINK OF, AND WITH VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING UPGRADED AT ONCE, i HAVE HAD MY SHARE OF COMPATIBILITY PROBLEMS. tHE NEW SYSTEM IS A FANTASTIC MACHINE, AND THE OLD ONE MAKES A NICE STARTER SET FOR SOMEONE. sPECIAL THANKS TO jOE nORTON FOR MAKING THIS PROCESS SO PAINLESS, AND OF COURSE TO kIRK rEISER AND HIS HELPERS FOR sPEAKUP ITSELF. cHUCK. My web site is http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh Back when I was a boy it was 40 miles toeverywhere, uphill both ways, and it was always snowing!
