@maschelsea: here is my advice and a few guidelines:

1. Wipe your Slackware installation.
2. Install Slackware anew.
3. Read Get acquainted with Slackware and figure out how Slackware differs from Gentoo.
4. Forget about portage, locally compiling stuff, and trying to optimize things.
5. More generally, at least tentatively forget Gentoo. Slackware doesn't work like Gentoo at all, with regard to installation, the software packages management and the init system.
6. Do not go multilib, at least not yet.
7. Keep your Slackware as genuine as possible.
8. You may use (preferably very few) SlackBuilds from slackbuids.org and use the recommended way to install the resulting packages but never ever use the "./configure && make && make install" way of installing things, and do not fiddle manually with anything in bin/, sbin/, usr/, lib/ and lib64/.

Following these guidelines until you feel "at home" in Slackware will save you a lot of time. At least that's my forecast.

Good luck.

I've (currently) got X working. I did all the stuff on the slackware multilib page. Here is a bit from my history file:

540 mkdir multilib
541 cd multilib
542 SLACKVER=14.2
543 lftp -c "open http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/multilib/ ; mirror -c -e ${SLACKVER}"
544 upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new *.t?z
545 ls
546 cd 14.2
547 upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new *.t?z
548 upgradepkg --install-new slackware64-compat32/*-compat32/*.t?z

That should have been all of it for multilib. I then re-ran the goffice Slackbuild script, I ran installpkg on the archive it created, and I ran the gnumeric Slackbuild script with the EXACT SAME RESULTS:
checking for LIBSPREADSHEET... configure: error: Package requirements (
libgoffice-0.8 >= 0.7.0
libgsf-1 >= 1.14.6
libxml-2.0 >= 2.4.12

libglade-2.0 >= 2.3.6
gtk+-2.0 >= 2.10.0
) were not met:

No package 'libgoffice-0.8' found

What's next?

OK. I'll try a wipe and reinstall. I was hoping I wouldn't have to do that again...

I've finally got gnumeric. Now I've lost file-roller. But I'm trying to figure THAT out in a different thread where it belongs. Thank you to all who have helped me/given me advice. I will try very hard not to do anything Gentoo-like anymore.

This is one of the most difficult things when switching to a new distro. You have so many things ingrained into your memory on how things work and then a new distro changes a lot of that. Hopefully the transition isn't too hard, but we'll be here to help you along the way

Good luck!

maschelsea,

best to start with a clean install, as suggested above. Then get familiar with what SlackBuilds are and how they work:
https://slackbuilds.org/howto/

after you know how to run them manually, you may wish to try some tools that automate the process for you:
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...stem/sbotools/

or the excellent https://www.sbopkg.org/ and its queue files https://www.sbopkg.org/queues.php

read about each of these before you use them. There are other tools as well, let other users suggest something.

Try changing your hostname to something more suitable for Slackware.