Since syslog-ng basically supersedes klogd/syslogd daemons, stock Slackware sysklogd package should be removed, and leftovers cleaned up, so here are some things you need to do: Remove useless logrotate configuration: rm /etc/logrotate.d/syslog Make syslog-ng start automatically on boot, without modifications to rc.M: cd /etc/rc.d && ln -sf rc.syslog-ng rc.syslog cd /usr/sbin && ln -sf syslog-ng syslogd To make transition even easier, I converted syslog.conf from sysklogd package to syslog-ng.conf format. You can find it in /etc/syslog-ng. Another thing worth mentioning here is rc.syslog-ng, which is written to also emulate syslogd. On a successful start/stop it will copy/remove syslog-ng.pid to /var/run/syslogd.pid so that rc.inet1 doesn't attempt running rc.syslog for a second time.