I use Slackware current at home (2 machines) and also at work. While I have all the luxury of updating to the latest and the greatest software at home (except kernel driver for old laptop) I don’t have such privilege at work. Have blindly upgraded to current to the point where I broke my Xorg and there is no turning back.
Overview
Within the corporate world, it is very difficult to install software since you’ll go through several process and requires approval. Well, all I want is just to upgrade my VirtualBox to the latest version.
The bottom line of the story is that the recent Slackware Linux software (kernel, xorg) is not compatible with my VirtualBox version. Well, we could mess up with the kernel, but not with xorg ever. I managed to upgrade a month ago some software but skip the xorg packages. I even accidentally upgraded xorg components and suffered the pain but have recovered by rolling back the xorg packages.
Lately, for some stupid reason, I’m tempted to upgrade to XFCE 4.10. It looks like it needs the latest stock xorg package so I tried to upgrade some packages and things started to break. Revert, re-install, remove and re-add package, things goes on and on.
The last thing I’ve remembered is that my network connectivity gets broken.
Last Resort
My last resort is to wipe out the whole installation and re-install a fresh copy. I will never go Slackware-current at work (not until I get chance of upgrading VirtualBox). My decision is to stick with Slackware 13.37 and stay up to date with that branch. It will still get occasional updates and patches like the latest Firefox.
So that’s it for now and I’m still downloading the disk2 (corporate bandwidth quota/bandwidth police watching).