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Compelete and easy guide to installing programs in a slackware enviroment

Hello, My name is cheesemonger and i am a newb to linux. a friend of mine likes linux a lot so he reccomened i try slackware (i all ways wanted to try linux) I installed Slackware 10.2 using a guide on another fourm site. However, I was wondering if someone could lay down an easy to follow guide to installing programs in slackware, i've browsed this site and found nothing to suite my technological level of Linux understanding. If any one could make said guide to installing programs, that would be loverly.

thanks much

CheeseMonger

Well, I think there are basically two ways of installing programs on slackawre:

1)using packages
2)compiling from source

For the first way, there's really nothing complicated. You just find the slackware package of the application you need (from www.slackware.com, www.linuxpackages.net or some other source), download it, an then (as root) run the "installpkg" command, and that's all. You may also need to check your program dependencies but this is usually explained on the program website.

The second way is more complicated, but usually follow some well defined steps: first download the source tarball from you program website. Then decompress it to some location. Say you have downloaded it to "/tmp" then to decompress you just have to go to this directory (cd /tmp) and run this command:

Code:

tar -xzvf ./package.tar.gz (if the package is gzipped)

or

tar -xjvf ./package.tar.bz2 (for packages compressed with bzip2)

then in most cases you'll have to play with autotools configure (there are some other way to compile a program but this is the most used, but everytime you need to install something, be sure to check the README to know how to compile).

This is quite simple (most of the time) just run (from the extracted directory, say /tmp/package):

Code:

./configure 

then 

make

and finally (as root)

make install

And you're done !

Obviously this is a really schematic explanation of the basic steps and you should read the instructions to know the details, dependencies, etc... when you're installing a program.

Hope this help...

Im sorry i still dont comprehend:confused: What is a "package" and though your information is good i'm still confused.
Is there a walkthrou i can view?

CheeseMonger