Originally Posted by BCarey

The how-to mentioned by BrianL is a must-read.

You may have some misconceptions about what you are doing which makes this confusing to you. A tar.gz file is a compressed archive containing any number of files and directories. The SlackBuild.tar.gz contains the SlackBuild itself and all the necessary files to build the software, except the source itself. That is contained in another tar.gz file, which should be left compressed and put in the same directory which was created when you opened the SlackBuild.tar.gz with the "tar" command. (This last step is what you didn't do which gave the the informative error message in your first post.)

If you do all of the above as a normal user, you will have no permission problems. Now you have your build environment all set up, so cd into that directory, su to root, and run "sh whatever.SlackBuild". (If you copy only the SlackBuild script itself and the source into a different directory you will be missing other files necessary to the build process, hence your most recent, again informative, error message.)

Now this does not actually install anything, so none of this has to do with the package manager yet. This compiles the program and packages it up in a .tgz file, which is a Slackware-appropriate package which can then be installed using installpkg (as root). The .tgz file itself is just a compressed archive itself of the program binaries and related files.

Brian