Hello,

I plan on reinstalling Slackware but this time with more customization. The first time I installed it I didn't use LVM2 or anything and just put it on.

For LVM2 I'll be reading the LVM2 How-to from my mirror's repository, but it seems Slackware.com is down, or at least my browser isn't able to connect to it. Does anybody else have this problem?

As for packages, I would like to compile from source by myself without using sbopkg or the SlackBuilds scripts, so my question is for those who choose to take this method, how do you keep up with all of the package and dependency updates?

If I put /tmp in RAM, is it enough to move the tar file into /tmp, extract it there, and then do the ./configure, make && make install in /tmp to count as if it were installing in RAM?

A lot of files in the repository for Slackware are already binaries in order to install quickly, but is there a way I can customize those files by removing or adding in certain parts like Gentoo's USE flags let me customize? If I take this route, will "slackpkg --upgrade-all" rebuild them the same way, or will those individual packages have to be redone whenever they're updated?

Sorry for the many questions, and thank you for taking the time to read through my post and answering questions.

Slackware website is down.

Slackware.com seems to be working for me tonight.

It was down for a short time a couple days ago but came back up in about half an hour.

It looks up to me.

Well, I've done some do-it-yourself package creation/management.

First bit of advice: use sbopkg as much as you can. Honest. If you want to go through your own "learning by burning" experience, I can understand it but I suspect that you'll end up in the same end state. You can read the slackbuild scripts via sbopkg, so it's not like you can't learn from them.

Second bit of advice: if you don't use sbopkg, run off and get src2pkg. It's an awesome tool and worth having around for those items that you cannot get via sbopkg.

This won't count as advice, since I'm not sure that I'd do it again: install slapt-get and put your home-build packages in your own local repository. The FAQ should tell you how to do that; it's been a while since I had run my system that way.

If you really want to have all/most of your stuff custom-built, IMO you should just use Gentoo. That's what Gentoo does, after all. It isn't really what Slackware does. (I've played around with Gentoo, myself. I'd probably use that distro if I ever decide to stop using Slackware.)

Well I've found that in order to install VLC, I needed to add the qt4 USE flag, but it also installed some other programs such as Designer and Linguist. I thought there would be a workaround but the Gentoo forums stated that those are additions with the qt4 USE flag so there was no way around it. Whereas from my Slackware use days, Slackware did have qt4libs (or something of that name) which allowed VLC to still have a GUI without adding in Linguist or Designer.