I'm a SlackWare administrator with minimal experience, but not quite a total n00b. I've used DOS and Windows variants for a couple of decades, though.

I have built a couple of minimal SlackWare 11 servers for single purposes: ftp server with a few read-only files, Samba server with CUPS for my Windows boxen to spool print jobs, etc. Each day, I get a little more frustrated with my own failure to get accustomed to the vi editor (SlackWare uses elvis), and I want to go back to pico (installed on my full Slackware installation) or nano (which I've seen on a couple of Fedora-based appliances).

To get pico in a package on SlackWare 11, I have to install pine (an internet EMail reader client I don't really care about). Pine, in turn, wants to see the cyrus-sasl package installed. I'm trying to keep my servers as lean as possible, so I'd rather not add this extraneous material that I plan not to use.

How (and where) can I obtain a .tgz package that will install via SlackWare's installpkg command with just pico or just nano alone?

hi,

nano will be added in the next slackware release (it's currently in -current ).
meanwhile you can compile it by your own or grab a package from http://www.linuxpackages.net/pkg_details.php?id=10594 .

there are also a lot of alternatives(ed, jed, mcedit, joe, ... )

The first thing I do when I install Slackware is compile and install nano. Very easy, just extract and ...

well considering that he said he had a minimal install im willing to be that he doesnt have anything from /d install so he wouldnt be able to compile it. if you really want nano you can try the package from -current. i wouldnt use anything from lp.net, they arent clean builds. personally i wouldnt use nano if you have pico. they are pretty much the same thing. if you want a really slick text editor thats way better than pico check out "joe"

well, if you don't have any development packages you could just use the binary of nano ... it's also on the GNU nano site.

or you could just try this considering that its built for slackware http://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux...0.3-i486-1.tgz
sorry for picking a crappy mirror but im at penn state and im kind of stuck using it

Oh, that's just what I wanted to hear. I've got a server in my network that does a weekly rsync job to update Slackware sources....

there it is! slack-server:/slackware/slackware-current/slackware/ap/nano*.tgz is installpkg-ing onto my little server right now!

thanks heaps!

Please do not install Slackware -current packages onto a system that's not running Slackware -current. This is always good advice, but much more important right now since -current has a newer C library version (as well as numerous other libraries) than what is available in any official release. In addition to glibc, nano links to the ncurses library, and the -current version of this is also newer than that on 11.0. To make a long story short, you can quickly find yourself with an unusable system if you upgrade the wrong packages from the -current branch.

In case it's not clear, the -current branch is the *development* version of Slackware. It is not intended to be used on a production system (even if it *is* usually stable enough to do so), and at any given time, some parts of it may be incompatible with other parts - again, it is the *development* branch leading to the next stable release.

Since this post is long enough, I'll start a new one to address the original question...

RW

If you want to install nano on a Slackware version less than -current, I recommend building a package yourself with this: http://slackbuilds.org/repository/development/nano/
See http://slackbuilds.org/howto/ for instructions.

I know you mentioned that these are minimal installations, but if you have the disk space, there's no good reason to not have a compiler on the boxes. I know that some people think it's a security benefit to not have a compiler, but that's absurd - if I get into the box, there's no good reason why I can't just download a static $BAD_BINARY for whatever I need to do; I don't need your compiler. More importantly, by not having a compiler, you are making your job as administrator more difficult, so not having a compiler becomes a net loss.

If disk space is really a problem, you could set up a chroot build environment (for each Slackware version of which you have a server running) on your fastest box and then use those chroot environments to compile needed software for the other boxes.

RW

Thanks for the warning. I'll rip it out and go back to sources.