How does one install and run PCSX for linux?
I have found the .tgz file, but do not know what plugins to install or how to install them as well?

Does the .tgz package come with all the plugins required for running PCSX?

Also would PCSX2 run PCSX ROMs? Is it backward compatible?

How does one go about getting PCSX to work in a linux distro like slackware for example.

Don't know if you still need help with this but here's what I know.

I don't know about PCSX but PCSX2 comes with plugin sources and a script build.sh which compiles and installs the emulator with all included plugins. You simply have to start it with "sh build.sh" and hope that it all works. If you want peops SPU to use ALSA instead of OSS find its makefile.am and change the variable for ALSA (should be at the top of the file) to TRUE.

PCSX2 doesn't work with PSX games and probably never will. It would be silly to make a program that emulates PS2 which then emulates PSX when there are already good and fast PSX emulators.

btw, I've had much more luck with ePSXe than with PCSX both in Windows and Linux when it comes to compiling, configuring plugins and playing the games. The only game which I had to run in PCSX is Chrono Cross. Note that whichever emulator you wish to use it might be good idea to look for a package for your distro. I was surprised to find out that my distro (SUSE) includes PCSX, although their own quite bad version.

I hope this helps at least a little.