After a 7 year absence, I'm back with slack. My question is this. How are we installing, updating packages these days? I vaguely remember package repositories. Are those still active and is that the best way to maintain, install and such? I'm on 14.2. My last version I believe was 10. It's all pretty familiar, but there are some questions I'm trying to figure out the answers too. Thanks in advance for your help!

Jeff

slackpkg is now included in Slackware to allow you to easily update to the latest official packages (for patches to your current version). It can also be used to update from one version to another, however, there's more possibilities of something breaking with that. man slackpkg will provide you the basics, but to start, you'll need to uncomment one mirror in /etc/slackpkg/mirrors (you can use my [rl=https://github.com/bassmadrigal/scripts/blob/master/slack-mirror-speedtest.sh]slack-mirror-speedtest.sh script[/url] to help find the fastest mirror). Just make sure you uncomment the correct one for your version. We've seen some issues on the forum where someone running 14.2 uncommented -current and caused some issues with their system. Once that mirror is uncommented, you run slackpkg update gpg the first time to import the gpg key for the mirror. Then you run slackpkg update to get the latest information and finally slackpkg upgrade-al to download all the patches and upgrade your system. Be sure if there's a kernel update that you update your bootloader accordingly (rebuilding your initrd if needed).

Next, one of the greatest things to come to Slackware packages is https://slackbuilds.org (commonly called SBo). This site hosts SlackBuilds that will allow you to compile software reliably and reproducibly. Any required dependencies are required to be available on the site and mentioned in the .info file. Any optional dependencies should be listed in the README and are almost always available on SBo, however, occasionally you'll come across one or two that aren't available. There's a number of tools to help automate building of software from SBo like sbopkg, sbotools, slpkg, slackrepo, and probably others I'm forgetting. However, I would recommend doing it manually a few times to learn how everything works so if something breaks or you need to modify a SlackBuild or .info, you can have the knowledge on what to do.

While Slackware still doesn't provide any dependency resolution (if you do the full install, all dependencies are met), many of those above mentioned tools are able to generate some sort of build queue so it can build and install the required dependencies for a program before you try and build the program itself.

3 members found this post helpful.

You can find a tutorial for slackpkg here:

https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:slackpkg

This may also be of some use to help you remember a few things:

https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:beginners_guide

Once you become comfortable with slackpkg and sbopkg you may find the following tool useful:

http://slakfinder.org/slackpkg+.html

It's an extension to slackpkg that makes working with third party repos quite easy. I personally find it useful for setting up multilib and Plasma 5 via Alien Bob's repos as well as utilizing slackonly to install binaries of programs that would otherwise take ages to compile (e.g. LibreOffice.) Eric (Alien Bob) includes an example of using slackpkg+ in his multilib tutorial here:

http://docs.slackware.com/slackware:multilib

I used to use slackpkg religiously and never had an issue. It was a simple process and easy and logical. Sbo wasn't around then, but I've been looking at that as well. It's been 4 years since I had time to dedicate to slack. It feels good to know I didn't lose everything I used to know! From everything I've read, any choice is a good choice.

This really depends on where you get the packages and how they're built. I imagine most would recommend building the packages yourself (usually from SBo) as that alleviates your dependency issues. There are some usually "safe" repos like Eric's (Alien Bob), but when you start mixing repos, there's always the possibility of clashing dependencies (repo A includes Library X version 1.2.3, and repo B includes library X version 1.3.0... if you have a program from one of the repos that was built against 1.2.3 and another package from a different repo built against 1.3.0, you could potentially run into problems if that library's ABI changed).

If you are looking for binary packages of SBo, you should check out the Slack Only repository:

https://slackonly.com

There are some brief documents on the home page discussing how to use Slackpkg with slackpkg+, slpkg, and slapt-get package managers with the Slack Only repo. I use this repo to install packages that take a long time to compile on my older systems. Everything in this repo is built using slackrepo to verify dependency handling in the .info file of each SlackBuild.

So it's safer to use only slackpkg or sbopkg, but not mix the two? That makes sense. I have both installed, but haven't used them yet. The box is still pretty original in that respect. I am pretty impressed with sbopkg, as it has the dependencies taken care of, but if I'm not mistaken, slackpkg also let me know if I needed the dependencies. I will do more research before I go insanely mad and install everything. At least I now know what the options are and how to use them.

Thanks again all.

No, mixing slackpkg and sbopkg is fine.

There are two things with slackpkg. There's the stock package that comes with Slackware, and that is only used to update official packages to any newer versions that Pat puts out (usually security updates). You can find those updates in the patches/ folder on your favorite mirror. Then, there's an unofficial extension you can get for it called slackpkg+. This allows you to add extra repos to slackpkg, so you're able to use it to install 3rd-party packages. Depending on how you have slackpkg+ set up, you could have several different repos. This is the scenario where you could theoretically install incompatible software from two different repos. It may not happen the majority of the time, but it's more likely than if you build things yourself using something like sbopkg. I don't see very many issues on the forum from incompatible software, so it's possible you'd never run into issues, but the possibility is still there.

And I don't think slackpkg or slackpkg+ support dependency resolution, but I've never looked into it.

I've read some posts where people have/had issues with slackpkg+. I think for now, I'll stick to the basics until I get my head around things to where I'm more comfortable expanding the options. I see that some things have changed, but more over I've forgotten more than I remember at this point. Much reading to do. I have a couple of O'REILLY books from 10 years ago or so, and a lot still applies, but I can see some things are a bit dated, too. Lots of releases since my books were published. It's good coverage of the basics, CLI and such. Still enjoying the jump back in! I used to use GRUB, but it seems LILO is the preferred choice. I found GRUB easier to work with, i.e. adding different flavors to a multi-boot. That might be my next project.

Well, lilo is getting a bit dated. It still works great for BIOS booting, but since UEFI is the way forward, and lilo likely won't be updated to accommodate that, Slackware has added elilo, which is similar, but different to lilo. Grub2 is also installed and available, there's just nothing in the installation wizard to set it up. You need to do that manually.

But welcome back! We'll be happy to try and help if you get stuck

Safe to say I'm getting a bit dated as well. And thanks! Planned or not, I will get stuck.