13 October 2008

Upgrade misery

I have learned my lesson.

After many happy months with Slackware 12.0, I grew jealous of the pretty bootscreen (idiot) with 12.1, and I tried to upgrade my hand-me down Toshiba P4 via Slackpkg. It was a disaster---the internet and (especially) Emacs were hopelessly slow, and several GTK-based programs did not work.

On the bright side, I resurrected the computer with a fresh install of 12.1, and everything is running quickly again (except Xe, but I might be better off that way). The best part about the new regime is my new partitioning scheme:

/dev/hda1 (not mounted; /usr/local from the old install) (12 GB)
/dev/hda2 /usr/local jfs  defaults 1 2 (10 GB)
#/dev/hda3 /boot      ext2 defaults 1 2 (not mounted) (50 MB)
/dev/hda5 swap       swap defaults 0 0 (1 GB)
/dev/hda6 /          jfs  defaults 1 1 (6 GB)
For one thing, I am now using JFS filesystem instead of ReiserFS, which is no longer cool. More importantly, the next time I break everything, all I need to do is reinstall to the sixth partition without touching anything else. All programs and files for this computer are on /usr/local. The directories /home, /opt, and /usr/src symbolically link to /usr/local/home, /usr/local/opt, and /usr/local/src, and only official Slackware packages install to /usr (via ./configure). Everything I compile gets installed to /usr/local, although I've kept a fair amount of extra space on the root (/) partition, just in case.

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