How can I search for unofficial packages in Slackware? *Packages like guake terminal*
 

The normal repositories do give you quite a bit of packages, and they're enough to get it up and running, but it's not enough to use as an every day distro. I want to know how do I search and install packages outside of the regular repositories? Do I have to manually add unofficial ones? If so, can you recommend me some?

*I'm running Slackware 13.37 in a Virtual Box, it looks pretty good so far.*

You can use SlackBuilds. Just download the SlackBuild, build the package(s), and install it. Or you can use sbopkg, which provides an ncurses interface for you to browse SlackBuilds. You can add packages to a queue and have them all build and installed automatically, if you wish. There is also an option to have everything installed through sbopkg updated at once. It doesn't handle dependencies though, so make sure to check the readme files when grabbing a SlackBuild, they'll list dependencies which can also be found on SlackBuilds.

There are also other third party programs that are similar to APT and have their own repositories but I don't have any experience with them so I'll let someone else elaborate.

Sbopkg will handle dependencies if you install the repository of queuefiles and use a queuefile to build a package. Well worth setting up - they make complex builds much easier.

I used slapt-get for a while when I tried GSB. slapt-get is an "APT like system for Slackware package management". There's a graphical interface for it called gslapt.

You can get them here: http://software.jaos.org/

Ah yes, I forgot to mention that as I haven't used it myself it. I heard about it but haven't tried it out yet as I rarely install much from SlackBuilds.

3rd party repositories and unofficial (!) package management tools, I use:

SlackBuilds.org, sbopkg
Slacky, slackyd
For original sources, for which no SlackBuild script and no Slackware package is available, I frequently use src2pkg.

My favourite repos are, however, Alien Bob's and Robby Workman's.

I have also used slapt-get in the past, mainly for packages from http://linuxpackages.net, but prefer Slacky.eu/slackyd now.

An overview of tools for package creation, conversion and management seems to be this Slackware related blog.

Be careful with tools, you are not familiar with, though, and with software from less popular repos. Packages from SlackBuils.org, slacky.eu, Alien Bob and Robby Workman, plus a few others can generally be trusted. But in the end, *you* are responsible for your system, and this responsibility cannot be delegated!

Have fun!

gargamel

With sbopkg you can also do this as root on the command line:

sbopkg -s <package> (search for package in the SlackBuild repository)
sbopkg -i <package> (install package from repository)

Before, I just download packages from SlackBuilds.org and build them in an order if there are dependencies. Then I tried sbopkg. It saves a lot of time and adds more to my laziness :D

Although I build the usual way if the package I need to install is not yet updated in SBo.

http://sbopkg.org/

I'm just wondering why sbopkg was not hosted in SBo :D