Simply not so. I've ran into several programs over the years who either will not run or are "crippled" when ran as root.
And, no, I haven't been keeping a list.

0ad won't run (not hard to go around)
thunar has that annoying red text
xmms2 wants a meter long option

everything else i ran works fine

The command su stands for switch user. Running su something tries to have you log in as something, so running su slackpkg will attempt to log into your system using the user slackpkg, which obviously doesn't exist. As dugan pointed out, you would need to either run su by itself, which will "switch user" to root (if no argument is provided, it will provide you the password prompt for root), or su -c "command here" to run a particular command as root. I, like dugan, typically will just run su to get the root prompt and then run my commands from there.

Now, as to not having slackpkg showing as an invalid command, this is probably because you weren't logged in as root. Certain programs, that are designed to only be run with root privileges, will not be visible to regular users, so that's probably why it wasn't found. And wtf is not a valid command, and since that was in front of wget, wget wasn't run.

The commands I posted for Chrome can all be run as a regular user. Once you have the google-chromem pacakge created, you would need to run installpkg google-chrome*.t?z to install Chrome (the * and ? in the command are wildcards and will allow you to install Chrome regardless of the version). You can also follow dugan's advice by installing Chromium, which is an open source version of Chrome (Chrome is mostly Chromium, with some closed source things included like flash). The additional packages he suggests are to get flash installed, since it isn't included with Chromium. Personally, I just go with Chrome because I am lazy and don't want to deal with the multiple packages.

If you've been running the system as root for a while, it will take a bit to get used to needing to elevate your privileges when root access is needed, but it will be worth it in helping secure your system. Once you've been doing it for a while, it just becomes second nature. And for most users, it isn't very common when you need to elevate your privileges.

Good luck and feel free to ask more questions and get more clarification

2 members found this post helpful.

If you want to solve your problems with playing flash video on you tube, open firefox, in the address line type in "about:config" hit enter
When it comes to void your warranty click OK I understand. Right click in the body of the messages then click "new" then "Boolean" at enter the preference name. "extensions.blocklist.enabled" tell it ok and enjoy youtube!

Roger

I don't like this kind of advice which seems to be quite common in forums for the technologically impaired.
Giving directions about disabling a security deature without telling why this would be good, or what it does exactly, or what the consequences may be, is not what I expect to see in a Slackware forum.

Let me quote directly from Mozilla:

You can just re-enable Flash if you permanently blocked it by mistake. Or upgrade it if you are still using an outdated and vulnerable version.

Eric

2 members found this post helpful.

Ive tried all of these; accept chrome installation cause I just dont understand how to install; especially with all these things that I need to install with it.

Hi, chairman.kiel, what I had to do to get flash working was to go to preferences click advanced tab and then choose general and untick the box "use hardware acceleration when available"

Flash also is often disabled by browser now by default. However, you should get a small pop-up asking to execute Flashplayer per instance. Just click "enable Flashplayer and remember" ior similar and you'll be fine. This is now the case on most Mozilla based browsers.

What problems are you having getting Chrome installed? I posted the instructions on how to get it on an earlier post.

Let me try again. You should be able to literally just copy and paste these commands directly at the prompt (except for entering your password when you are prompted for it). There should be no reason to run any additional commands or to put any commands in front of these.

There should be no reason to enter any additional commands. wget is part of the standard Slackware install, so if you don't have that, then we need to work on getting you all of Slackware installed. If you have any errors with any of these commands, paste the output into here so we can find out the problem.

If you still want to watch youtube videos on Firefox, we need more information. Do you have flash installed? If so, where did you get it and how did you install it? Does it show up in about:plugins (you put that directly in the address bar and hit enter).

And sorry, I missed your reply saying that firefox -P didn't start the profile manager. It had been a while since I've used that command, and it looks like is is actually a lowercase p (not sure if I remember wrong or they changed it). So, [b]firefox -p[/url], should launch the profile manager (you need to make sure Firefox is completely shut down before you use that, otherwise it will just open another window).