I went back to Slackware again, and the knots in my stomach are starting to act up again.

There is not a single application that I have been trying to install using tarballs, that I have been able to finish. This is due to a rash of missing dependencies. Since I can't get Swaret to compile properly, I can't use it to update or maintain any packages. Then I tried Slapt-get, again, with the same results. For simplicity, I enven tried to compile "rdate" to keep the system clock up-to-date, and that didn't compile either! Again, missing something.

I tried to install rdate using an RPM version. This time, I got a lot of dependencies error messages, and also segmentation faults. The segmentation problem occurs with anything that I try to unravel using RPM.

So, where do I go from here? How, where, can I get a COMPLETE package of either Swaret or, Slapt-get, without chasing for hours all over the internet trying to find missing applications? The version on disk 2 of Slackware is corrupt, so I can't use that one either! And no, it has nothing to do with the MD5 numbers, that checked out ok. It is such a shame that at least one of those packages isn't included in the distribution. It would make this distro so much more precious.

How did you accomplish this? I would like to hear from you. Perhaps you could set me straight.

I'd suggest you stick with Mandrake ...

As for the
bit - how about posting a few of those problems,
with the messages you get, instead of just venting?


Slackware is a good distro as is, swaret and slapt-get
are -IMHO- unnecessary ;)



Cheers,
Tink

Ok well first of all you don't compile swaret. You use installpkg... just type installpkg (name of swaret package). For RPMs you can't just install them like normal. You have to use rpm2tgz... just type rpm2tgz (name of RPM) then use installpkg. Or insted of installpkg you can use pkgtool. It's a graphical version of it and it can also remove packages. The only thing that I have ever had to use the rpm2tgz thing on is the ATI drivers. Most RPMs are binaries that are for other distros. There aren't that many programs that provide Slackware Binaries so your better off compiling most everything from source. Read the Readme and Install files for more info on that. Most of the time though you just extract the file and then cd into the folder and do a ."/configure" then a "make" and than a "make install". Hope that helps