Hi O great slackware community,

I have Fluxbox-0.1.14 that was installed as a package (if im not mistaken) in Slackware 9.1. I now wonder how do I upgrade to the latest 0.9.7? Or do I have to remove the package and install the latest 0.9.7?

Thanks in advance.

Remove the package with removepkg packagename.tgz and install the new one from source, it really is a lot better. It's very small and fast to compile.

Thanks kovacs. I'm in Lynx right now without nice GUI. I downloaded the 0.9.7 source code and its in my home directory now. Ok so ill run the command tar -xvyf fluxblablabla-0.9.7.tar.bz2 and I get the directory fluxboxblabla. Should I unbzip it under home directory or somewhere else? After this how do I install it and get it working?

Thanks.

you would do better to download the slackware ...tgz package for fluxbox 9.7 from the fluxbox site and to install it with installpkg fluxbox......

it works for me. much easier.

I like to complie flux from source because I find it a bit faster that way, and also because you can compile in support for KDE and/or gnome apps, so icons that would go in the system tray (eg for kopete) go in the fluxbox slit.

If you still haven't downloaded and installed, untar the tarball to your home directory, then:

./configure (you can add --enable-kde and/or --enable-gnome to compile in support for either or both)
make
make install (as root)

the make install will put everything in /usr/local for you and you're ready to go. It's worth starting off with clean init and menu scripts in ~/.fluxbox because there are a lot of extra features in the new version.

Thanks guys. =) thanks kovacs for the kde tip.. =)

Now I got problems again. Kovacs, I did the make install under root. Then at command line I did "startx" but it gave me an error : command not found.. What do I do?

Are you trying to do startx as root? By default in Slack startx is not in root's path, you would have to change root's path to include /usr/X11R6/bin if you wanted to use X as root. That's not a very good idea though, so you should create a regular user account to use the gui.

If you're running as a regular user and it's complaining that it can't find fluxbox, you might need to check that it is actually installed in /usr/local/bin, and that your ~/.xinitrc explicitly has the full path to fluxbox:
exec /usr/local/bin/fluxbox

I'm going to put in a plug for Checkinstall, which is one of the most useful tools I've found. When you compile a program from source, you run checkinstall instead of make install and checkinstall will create a Slackware package from the custom compiled code and then installs it like you would with installpkg. The upshot is you get the benefits of a custom compiled program with the ease of being able to use Slackware package managment tools.