I have not tried Slackware in a while (2012 was the last time).

The biggest problem I had was the limited number of software packages available.

I just installed 14.2 and if I just want to add the programs I use most frequently, that requires installing 43 additional packages.

SlackBuilds has a lot of them but it is time consuming to manually install that many programs from source. Especially since some (like chromium) take hours to compile.

I found a large list of Linux repositories (including Slackware) here:

https://pkgs.org/

Some of them have hundreds of pre-compiled Slackware packages available, the problem is I don't know anything about their quality.

Can anyone make some comments about the ones they are familiar with?

There are many binary repos out there, here's the one we maintain in-house:

https://freeslack.net/fxp/freeslack64-14.2/fxp/

These packages are built on what is essentially a deblobbed Slackware, so they will almost certainly work great with the stock OS. They are largely based on SlackBuilds scripts, with similar dependencies and gotchas. Full OS install is assumed, and *.req files list the actual dependencies, all resolved within our repo. (We also provide a package manager, but it is not designed for the stock Slackware; but wget and installpkg will work.)

We are currently in the stage where we take user input in regards to expanding this repo. Even though you may be uninterested in FreeSlack, please do not hesitate to drop by in our IRC or forum, and let us know which packages you would like to see pre-built; can't hurt

don't use pkgs.org: besides being a site full of ads (evil!), it mixes a lot of repositories that provide packages of different versions.
installing packages from different sources is the best way to break your system.
my advice is: use SBo for pretty much everything and if you want a prebuilt chromium get it from Alien Bob.

3 members found this post helpful.

If time is less of a factor, I've recently been using Slackrepo. It doesn't have prebuilt packages, but it will download and compile SlackBuilds and their dependencies from SBo, Ponce's repo and a few others. I personally don't like using prebuilt packages, aside from a few that I get from Eric's repo that Ponce mentioned.

There are only a few repositories I trust.
I get most of what I need from Alien Bob,

http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/

You can work your way to his slackbuilds from the link above. I would recommend using the repositories at slackware.uk as I've had download speed problems (as in SLOW) with the others.


There are also rworkman's Slackware packages at,

http://rlworkman.net/pkgs/


and I've had good luck with the packages from SlackOnly,

http://packages.slackonly.com/pub/packages/14.2-x86_64/


Anything else I build from

https://www.slackbuilds.org/

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Chromium you get from Alien Bob as a prebuilt package:

http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/chromium/

You then use slackpkg+ to update it, along with your other binary packages:

http://slakfinder.org/slackpkg+.html

Here's more information on slackpkg+:

http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/intr...-repositories/

For installing stuff SlackBuilds.org, you install sbotools.

https://pink-mist.github.io/sbotools/

Then installing what you want from SBo is:

It will fetch and build the dependencies from SBo.

yeah I use sbotool -- sboinstall and it grabs whats on slackbuilds.org and does everything for you.

I use SBo (with sbotools, but sbopkg is easy too), but there is SlackOnly which provides binaries from SBo scripts (although I don't know much about the provider of these packages). However, do not use chromium from SBo, it's way out of date (I personally think these kind of scripts should be removed if they're not kept up to date).

Besides the AlienBOB and Slackonly repos already mentioned, I must draw your attention for the excellent mled/mles packages by Niki Kovacs.
Here is relevant parts of my slackpkg+ config:


One thing that would help users is a small text file for each package describing what it does.

2 members found this post helpful.

There is also Salix, https://docs.salixos.org/wiki/Repository_mirrors

I am using slpkg for binary repositories and sbotools for sbo.
Bear in mind that while there are many third-party repositories for Slackware you'd better don't mix packages from different repos. I suggest that stick with sbo for small packages or packages that you want to pass options during build process.
For large packages you can use slonly as the binary repository that has been built from sbo using slackrepo. For packages with many dependencies Alien repository comes in handy.

I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this thread, there is a lot of useful information here.

So far I have been using slpkg to build packages from SBo. I have created 120 packages.

I had surprisingly little trouble. Much less than I expected. In a couple of cases the SBo source location was obsolete. I had to download the files manually from another source but it was not a problem because slpkg can create packages from local files.

vlc was a pleasant surprise, it has 52 dependencies. slpkg was able to download and build them all with only one small glitch, the avahi SlackBuild requires an avahi group and user to work. Once I created them everything went well. Virtualbox has a similar requirement.

Wavemon would not compile, it has some kind of bug in configure/Makefile. I was able to work around it using an environmental variable.

The only program I could not get to compile at all was hwinfo. It requires a 32 bit emulation library. Slackonly has it for 14.1 but not 14.2 so I suspect they could not get it to compile either.

Alien Bob has chromium and libreOffice packages that are more up to date than the SBo versions. I expect to get them.

There are a few other programs I use that are not in any of the Slackware repos I will probably have to compile those from source. IIRC, there is a a program I think it is called checkinstall that monitors compiling from source and creates a package for the program. I'll have to look into that.

So far I am enjoying my Slackware experience.

At present, the workable options for major web browsers on SBo seem to be Vivaldi and IceCat. LibreOffice is kept quite up to date too, although AlienBob's packages are also good.

Note that you are supposed to read the READMEs of *everything* you build from SBo: those "glitches" that you experienced wouldn't have been there in that case.
use any automatic tool you prefer, but please keep following SBo's guidelines and, if things don't work, try also building them using directly the SlackBuild provided, without using the third-party tools.

https://slackbuilds.org/howto/
https://slackbuilds.org/faq/

that's strange, all of the above seem to work fine here as they are (slackware64-14.2): can you please post the full logs of the errors you got?

You can search in sbosrcarch repository for source files. sbotools can do that automatically if downloading from main repository fails.
http://slackware.uk/sbosrcarch/


Robby's repository has more up to date libreoffice package. That is not a "still" version though.