This should be a simple thing, but when I download the wine slackware binary, and run slackpkg install wine-1.0.tgz, it looks like its installing, but its all really weird characters (non-readable). What am I missing or doing wrong? Please help

Also if I do installpkg ./wine-1.0-i486-1kjz.tgz I get the following, but wine is not installed...

Installing package wine-1.0-i486-1kjz-1...
PACKAGE DESCRIPTION:
Executing install script for wine-1.0-i486-1kjz-1...
root@Slackware:/home/ryan/Desktop#

oops nevermind looks like that did install it. but I'm sure ill have more questions in a minute

Where did you download this package? From the filename I am going to guess LinuxPackages.net?

On Slackware you should really try to avoid unofficial binaries as much as possible, and build everything you can from source using SlackBuilds. While this does take longer than simply installing a .tgz, you can be sure that the package will actually work and is built against all of the proper libraries that are on your system.

Thanks for the tip. I had tried the wine.SlackBuild, but it didn't seem to work as intended (i forget what happened). I ended up install using installpkg and the official binary release from winehq. Is this recommended or should i reinstall with the slackbuild?

I usually just compile wine from source myself, it produces the best results. Use the development version, I would recommend.