Reinstalling Salix (and other Slacks) / Switch 32 to 64 bits

[damNageHack]

Just a short notice how I reinstalled my system here. Switching from Salix32 to Salix64.

To keep all installed packages use this process:

1. Enter following command (before reinstallation) in console from your user directory:

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ls /var/log/packages/ |sed -e "s/-[0-9].*//" >packages.log

2. Backup your /etc/fstab and /home.
( /home should be mounted to a separate partition in the best case, but a backup can not harm anyway )
Tipp: Copy /etc/fstab (or maybe your complete /etc folder) to /home, then you have to do only a backup of /home including your /etc.

3. Reinstall with keeping your partition table as it is. Do not change anything in cfdisk, just Quit.

4. Let Setup mount / and /home as it was before.

5. After rebooting into the new system, copy /etc/fstab (or complete /etc if so wanted) from the backup back. Maybe do mount -a in console to get the other partitions mounted again ( I only use a separate partition for /home ).

6. In console, do the following command to install additional packages again (which are not on the installation iso):

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for file in `cat packages.log` ; do slapt-get -y -i $file ; done

Please note that this command will install your loved packages again just as it was before the reinstallation, but it can sometimes be a problem because of the naming of packages. So you have maybe to install some of those packages manually again by [g]slapt, but it should do the trick for most of them.
Because of the for, it will skip each package with an error and proceed with the next one. Giving all packages as one parameter to slapt-get (only one instance started) will result in slapt breaking at the first package error.

[thenktor]

5. After rebooting into the new system, copy /etc/fstab (or complete /etc if so wanted) from the backup back.

I've reused the whole /etc directory and you will run into troubles if you do so
After copying the /etc dir you have to do:

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rm -rf /etc/gtk-2.0/i486-slackware-linux/
slapt-get -u
slapt-get -i --reinstall gtk+2

[damNageHack]

5. After rebooting into the new system, copy /etc/fstab (or complete /etc if so wanted) from the backup back.

I've reused the whole /etc directory and you will run into troubles if you do so
After copying the /etc dir you have to do:

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rm -rf /etc/gtk-2.0/i486-slackware-linux/
slapt-get -u
slapt-get -i --reinstall gtk+2

Yes, and you probably should not do it in a running X or a runlevel greater than 2

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init 2