Hi,
Have just installed Matlab 2017 on Slackware64 14.2. When starting the program I get the error "missing libpam.so.0. Have tried to search for solution, but it is difficult to find anything useful. It seems that Slackware up to 14.0 had PAM in /extra which I have tried to compile on 14.2, but that failed.

Can someone point me in the right direction ?

Thanks.

You can give http://www.slackware.com/~vbatts/pam/ try.

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Most likely NOT.

Because this project is intended for PAMification of Slackware. Read: a Slackware with a functional PAM authentication.

Same is https://github.com/Dlackware/pam but this one is well maintained.

IF our OP chose the PAMification way to run Matlab, would be interesting to report back how the things work.

BUT, a BIG FAT WARNING: going the system PAMification could render the system unusable on smallest errors, as it plays with the authentication.

PS. Talking about the Slackware PAMification, the curious people can take a look on https://github.com/Dlackware/pam and see that for a minimal implementation is only need to add FIVE packages (including even the Kerberos) and to modify ONE (shadow). That's all, folks!

It is nothing about removing half of Slackware shipped packages, and to add over 500 new ones, like in the case of adopting Plasma 5 and removing KDE4, about which you guys talk with serenity!

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5 packages aren't that hard to do oneself if you require that functionality. Plasma 5 is coming, coming someday. Plasma 5 has new krita

Octave can do a lot of the things that Matlab can do and its open source:
http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.2/academic/octave/

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I don't want to break my system, but it is important for me to be able to run matlab so I have to try it out.

What happens when I have compiled and installed the packages? What do I need to configure ?

Yet, the old good excuse against PAM. In fact, why you are against PAM? You can explain what damages do to your system?

I tell you in few words: you can not! Because over years around PAM happened to grown layers and layers of false information, spread by no ones, for a mere moment of glory in a public forum.

And like was explained multiple times, adding PAM and Kerberos would be essentially a fork of Slackware, as they spread like a cancer over dependencies.

So, you suggest that thousands guys to FORK the Slackware, every one on his own, just because some lies?

To be honest, I think that the Plasma 5 is simply too big to be included in a moderate sized distribution like Slackware.

Plasma 5 is so big, that IF it will be adopted, there would be no Slackware anymore, but some Plasmaware. Just like the Android: a "rich" and huge desktop environment in the top of a (minimal) Linux system.

IF you want this Plasmaware, feel free to use thirdly-party repositories, BUT, I for one I want my Slackware, not the Plasmaware!

And I hope that Patrick Volkerding would see the trap set by Plasma 5, and when KDE4 would not compile anymore, would replace it eventually with some more lightweight desktop environment, even it is based on Qt.

In that moment you will get something which is not Slackware anymore, but your own Dauerware, where if you build something, it probably will fail because unresolved PAM and/or Kerberos dependencies...

And you will have to take the duty to maintain it, instead of Patrick Volkerding.

BUT, that's theoretical, at the end of day, would be interesting to research and report back the very impact of PAMification of a Slackware installation...

Our dear BDFL of Slackware doesn't seem to like PAM. As long as it doesn't get in my way I don't care either way, and having said that I don't like things that obfuscate what is going on (not saying PAM does or does not do this because I never looked into it). Its one of the reasons I use Slackware with its KISS philosophy. If he isn't going to use Plasma 5 then he should just drop KDE because Current is the development branch of the next Slackware. Why waste time supporting something that will be dropped in the next release and conflicts with Plasma 5 packages? Plasma 5 is like where Firefox and rust was. Its on the to-do list but not yet from what I gather based on what our dear BDFL of Slackware has said. Also there are several versions of Slackware available for the Plasma 5 phobics.

haha, so basically I am screwed

So I guess I have to decide whether to use matlab and find another distribution or live without it.

If I needed PAM I would use Dlackware's PAM.

Okay, I will back up my system and see what happens

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Compiled and installed all the pam files. Matlab is running

Let us see what problems I run into later.

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You installed only the LinuxPAM (aka pam) package, or all of those packages?

How did you determine that your claim holds truth?
Let me give you my view of sizes:

Slackware current's KDE plus KDEI (64bit):
Plasma5, its language files and its deps:
In order to understand why Plasma5's language files (the kdei section) is so small if you compare ith with KDE4 you need to know that those language files are just for the remaining kdelibs4 applications. All Plasma5 applications have their localizations inside the binary packages. This means you won't be able to selectively install just one or two languages - you get them all by default.

But apart from that fact, what you see above is that the sum of all packages for Plasma 5 (1184 MB) is just 146 MB larger than the KDE4 package set (1038 MB). And just the Qt5 plus the Noto TTF font packages are 153 MB in size. I would not consider Plasma5 to be "too big" for Slackware compared to KDE4.
But that's just my biased opinion.

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There is no problem in installing pam in slackware, although relatively pointless because nothing supplied with the slackware distribution uses pluggable authentication modules. If it satisfies a dependency of a pre-compiled binary you don't have the source for, installing it might be sensible - such as with google-chrome in earlier slackware versions - but if that pre-compiled binary intends to use pam for authentication it is likely to be disappointed because the particular module it is looking for may be missing, and even if it is there its configuration file might be incomplete.

I have one slackware64-current computer which has systemd and pam installed: it gives the option of either booting slackware's standard SysV-derived boot-up, or booting with systemd (you can pass the init as a kernel parameter). The only packages that really needed to be recompiled for this were shadow, dbus, polkit and wpa-supplicant. You also need to prune eudev, because systemd supplies pretty much everything except udevd (and is ABI compatible with eudev), which is still required for a SysV boot-up.

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