Installing from source is actually the best way, and it's surprisingly easy.

Slackware doesn't need a package manager. That's probably more work maintaining than a distro in itself, because you have to maintain all the packages people may or may not use and all kind of use cases.

However, if you want, there is a way to have a package manager on Slackware. There is something called GNU Guix which is a package manager, (but also a distro). It can be used as a package manager with most distroes. It's a bit of a strange concept to understand, but it is basically a package manager you can install on most distroes.

That's a good point ofcourse. Slackware does have a package manager. But many people don't think of it as a function, but rather as a combination of package manager and X amount of packages

My bad.

I updated my procedure for packages from just installing from source to rather build packages and install them with installpkg and removing with removepkg. That's as far as I've got right now. Back when I used Slackware last, it was rather the norm to just install from source, and I haven't had time to update myself on all the package managers and tools in Slackware, so for now only installpkg/removepkg.

Hello,

I know you wrote this a couple months ago, but if you see this, please report the bugs so I can try to fix them.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi

Thanks for reading my message, also thanks for making this tool, is a very good one, easy to use. Sorry, it wasn't my intention to bother, and I know that software is constantly improving and surely you have lots of work. The only "bugs" that I have found are when you search a package, then want to search another package, the list of packages are gone, the list of available packages appears again when I choose to sinchronize again, other than that, sboui works great .

I'm not so good at english, please excuse me. I attached some screenshots, hope they help to show what I'm trying to say.

Greetings

Attached Thumbnails

       

The fact that all these exist (there are more, actually) indicates that there's something seriously missing when it comes to package management on Slackware. I do not mean to sound like an asshole, nor I intent to start a flamewar. Just my two cents.

Hi,

I'm glad you like sboui. I'm quite fond of it myself.

Actually, the behavior you describe is a feature, not a bug. As of version 2.2, filters are cumulative by default, and searching counts as a filter. That allows you to, for example, search for all packages with "virtualbox" in the name, and then filter that by the ones you have installed. To get the full list back again, just do Filter -> All one time. Or, if you don't like that behavior, set "cumulative_filters = false" in sboui.conf or in the Options window. I do have it on my TODO list to make the labels of the various filter boxes explicitly say that you are filtering or searching the current list only when cumulative filters are on. I should probably go ahead and do that.

3 members found this post helpful.

I would explain the existence of those by the fact that they are third party tools to install packages from third party repositories.

For good and bad, the package management tools which ships with Slackware lacks support for dependencies. In practice, this is not a problem, as the recommended way to install Slackware is to do a full install. However, when you start installing third party software, you might find yourself spending a lot of time tracking dependencies. This tracking of dependencies must be done manually if you download the software from upstream sources yourself, build it and install it with something like "make install".

If you use a third party repository with prebuilt binaries, things might be a little easier if you choose a tool which keeps track of dependencies. Also if you build from source using SlackBuilds things will be easier if you choose a tool to keep track of dependencies.

But again, we are now talking about software which was not a part of the original Slackware installation. Every software that you might want is not part of the original Slackware installation and every third party software that you want might not be possible to find in third party repositories.

Even with the best of tools installed you might some day find yourself manually downloading software and tracking dependencies. Compared to many other distributions, Slackware is better suited for those cases when downloading and compiling source yourself as your "full install" likely contains more of the dependencies that the software needs.

regards Henrik

Yes, you are perfectly right. SlackBuilds.org is only a semi-official repo.

Oh, I see.

Haha, my bad, sorry for the inconvenience I caused, thank you for explaining how sboui works.

And again, sorry for the trouble.

Greetings

I remember in the past building from source and then using 'checkinstall'.
Seems that the checkinstall programs have not been updated since 2016.
Thats a shame it certainly was a handy piece of software.
Just rambling
john

1 members found this post helpful.

Here's my two cents: sboui, sbopkg and the whole slackbuilds site are excellent. As is slackpkg (I don't use slackpkg+ so can't comment, but I am sure it is equally excellent.)

As a result, I have a lot of choices around how I install programs and update my system. Thank you to all who maintain them, it must involve a lot of work.

No problem, it is a new feature and probably could be made more obvious what is happening in that scenario. Glad you like it.

I also remember it, it was awesome. Then I learned how to make actual SlackBuilds...