Upgrade to 4.4.118 [SOLVED}

[stabbmesiter]

Saturday April 21st 2018

Hi Everyone,
Salix is fast! Even on my low end i3 system, but I think I could do with some help/pointers
on my Salix install.

I downloaded and installed with no problems in a multiboot system (nixos/arch/mageia/sparky) - I chainload the other OS's to nixos grub as nixos is a bit weird and doesn't find/load other operating systems (chainload generated via arch - a bit of a pain as it's all manual and I haven't found a way to automate it).

Changed the repos for Salix via reposetup (after checking via https://www.salixos.org/mirmon.html that my desired repo was active and up to date) and updated via Gslapt Manager (gui). Noticed that the kernel was quite down rev' (4.4.29) and excluded from the update via entries in /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc (EXCLUDE=^aaa_elflibs,^aaa_base,^devs,^glibc.*,^kernel-.*,^rootuser-settings,^zzz-settings.*,-i?86-).

So I followed this link viewtopic.php?f=44&t=7509&p=44172&hilit ... nel#p44172
to upgrade the kernel and other excluded files. All went well with the upgrade and /boot indicated that 4.4.118 was now installed and various vmlinuz all pointed to vmlinuz-huge-4.4.118.

Alas on reboot I hit a problem in that the system booted fine until the gui login screen (which is GDM? - it appeared to be out of proportion i.e.stretched) I found that I had lost all input to the the system (laptop keyboard/attached USB keyboard and the USB mouse). After various efforts to get the system booted the only way I could boot was to add 'single' to the grub options - this at least gave me access to the terminal via the laptop keyboard, not the usb keyboard. Not being technical I was then a bit stuck.

Anyway, the only way I found to boot multi user was to copy over the vmlinuz from the install USB - which then allowed me to boot back into a gui session - but at, obviously, 4.4.29 (is this Spectre and Meltdown patched?). So that is my main problem i.e. cannot update to 4.4.118.

So no biggy as I have a working system via Salix (via vmlinuz from salixlive64-xfce-14.2.1.iso) but would ask if anyone has any pointers or is it, as normal, my error.

All the best and thanks for reading. I am impressed with Salix, fast, well thought out and including some good system tools - though I was surprised that a firewall was not included in the iso.

Isn't Sourcery Slackbuid Manager nice! Linux for the lazy Slacker indeed.

And fast!

Regards

[laprjns]

Alas on reboot I hit a problem in that the system booted fine until the gui login screen (which is GDM? - it appeared to be out of proportion i.e.stretched) I found that I had lost all input to the the system (laptop keyboard/attached USB keyboard and the USB mouse).

Usually when I have this problem it is because of a mismatch between the kernel being booted and the installed kernel modules. Did you upgrade the kernel modules? Check which kernel packages are installed by doing the following in a terminal"

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ls -l /var/log/packages/ | grep "kernel-"

If everything is upgraded to the lastest kernel (4.4.118) then it should look like this:

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rich[~]$ ls -l /var/log/packages/ | grep "kernel-"
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   61120 Mar  1 19:28 kernel-firmware-20180222_7344ec9-noarch-1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   25143 Mar  1 19:28 kernel-headers-4.4.118-x86-1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    1023 Mar  1 19:28 kernel-huge-4.4.118-x86_64-1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  253586 Mar  1 19:28 kernel-modules-4.4.118-x86_64-1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3478993 Mar  1 19:28 kernel-source-4.4.118-noarch-1

If any of these packages are not the 4.4.118 version then you need to install the latest packages by either using spi or slapt-get. The following command, using slapt-get will upgrades all five of these packages if they are not already up to the lastest version.

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$ sudo slapt-get -i kernel-huge kernel-headers kernel-modules kernel-firmware kernel-source

Note that even though you copied over the 4.4.29 kernel to vmlinuz, the package management system will still think that you have the 4.4.118 package installed and will not install it. So you will need to copy the 4.4.118 kernel back to vmlinuz.

[stabbmesiter]

Many thanks laprjns - that resolved the issue.
Upgraded and now running 4.4.118.
Guess I'm used to a non Slackware way of doing things.

regards and thanks