I just installed Slackware 12.1 on my Thinkpad x390... I have no Internet connection for my laptop... I was wanting to know how I could go about installing packages manually... I can download all the binaries on another computer and put them on a Cd or Flashdrive... Also does anyone know any good sites for desktop development... I would like to create a righteous manager.. something with transparency maybe there is a way to show the kernel running in the background while running software on kde

I guess it's deb you're using.

By editing the file /etc/apt/sources.list - marking the lines with an Internet server with a hash - and the running

apt-get update

you can turn off away the Internet sourcing.

The thing is... I work at a computer lab and the only source of internet is in the lab.. All the machines have Windows XP Os's... I thought maybe I could download the packages and put them on floppies or maybe a cd and then install them on my laptop from the media source...

What the **** did you inhale?


KidZero, installing packages manually is easy, even without network. Burn the packages to a CDROM, mount the CDROM on your computer and use the "installpkg" program to install.

Eric

right on you know a good site that has all the packages so i can download them all at once?

There are more friendly ways to correct me that Slackware does not use deb.

Although I do not know anything about tgz file packaging, I try to give a hint: There's a helper tool just like apt, called slackpkg, which is usually not installed. The same way installing it may be the same way as turning off Internet access:

Edit the file

/etc/slackpkg/mirrors

therefore. There is also a dependency-aware helper tool that can tell you the packages you should burn on CD before proceeding.

cheers

BTW: What do you meen with "desktop development"?

You can go directly to the slackware site and download packages.

http://www.slackware.com/getslack/

Also you can get excellent packages here:

http://www.slackbuilds.org/

http://slackware.com/~alien/

Well yeah, but I don't generally use those for clueless posters :-)
I give it to you though: you recovered very well in your second post. Kudos for taking the trouble as a non-slacker to check out alternatives to deb.

Eric

Just a note -- slackbuilds.org does not contain packages, but instead links to source code, along with a SlackBuild. SlackBuilds are my preferred method of installing software, but if you choose to try it installing from an offline source, make sure you include both the sources and the SlackBuild (at slackbuilds.org the SlackBuild is located within a .tar.gz archive -- you would need the entire archive to build the application).

In addition to Alien Bob's repository mentioned above, you should also be aware of rworkman's repository. Both include prebuilt packages as well as SlackBuilds.

Another nice resource is slacky.eu, which contains tons of prebuilt packages along with SlackBuilds. I would trust it a little less than slackbuilds.org and the two repositories linked above, but you shouldn't have any problems using packages from there. I would discourage the use of packages from linuxpackages.net though -- not all of their packages include build scripts, so you're basically going on blind faith that the package was created properly and will work. In addition, some of the packages have questionable dependencies. There ARE reputable packagers at linuxpackages.net, but finding them takes experience. If you do decide to use packages from linuxpackages.net, be sure to research which packagers are reliable and install only packages from them.

http://www.linuxpackages.net/

http://software.jaos.org/

http://www.slacky.eu/

Hi,
I really don't think 'Linuxpackages' is one that I would rely on entirely. I've used it but I prefer to use SlackBuilds.

You could look at 'Slackware Builds, Packages & Scripts' section of 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!