Keeping a Slackware Linux Server up-to-date

Synopsis

There are many methods you can use to upgrade Slackware packages, I detail how to use Swaret Here, but you don't need to use any 3rd-part tool to keep your Slackware system up-to-date. Here's how I do it...

Check for packages that need updating

You can either check Here, or subscribe to the Slackware-Security mailing list Here.

Upgrading the package

The advisory will give you information on why the package needs to be updated, and where to get it, for example:

A grayscale PNG image with a malformed (bad CRC) tRNS chunk will crash some
libpng applications.  This vulnerability has been assigned the identifiers
CVE-2007-2445 and CERT VU#684664.
For more information, see:
  http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2007-2445
(* Security fix *)

Updated package for Slackware 10.2:
ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-10.2/patches/packages/libpng-1.2.18-i486-1_slack10.2.tgz
    

To get the package, you can use wget and the url provided, for example:

wget ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-10.2/patches/packages/libpng-1.2.18-i486-1_slack10.2.tgz
    

Then read the advisory further, and it will give advice on how to upgrade the package, for example:

Upgrade the packages as root:
# upgradepkg libpng-1.2.18-i486-1_slack11.0.tgz
    

By running that upgradepkg command, you will now have updated your package. Sometimes there are further instructions on restarting services etc.