Slackware 13 Revisit

By EricMesa

January 23, 2010 - 3 minutes read - 568 words

In my Slackware 13 review mfillpot gave some suggestions to improve the Slackware experience and I thought I would give them a shot. First off, changing the init level to 4 to allow KDM to show up instead of this startx business. I was happy to note that Slackware had emacs. So many distros have vi and I never really learned how to use it well. So I changed the value to 4 and restarted. And there she is:

[caption id=“attachment_3000” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Slackware 13 - KDM”] [/caption]

Complete with a list of usernames for your users to click on if they think typing it out each time is too much of a hassle. (Of course, this has security implications, but that’s negligible in a personal setup) So I wanted to test out sbopkg. Last time I reviewed Slackware many of the comments were about how it was not a pain that Slackware did not resolve dependencies, but rather a virtue. I see and understand their points, but I respectfully disagree. So mfillpot’s suggestion of sbopkg being like apt-get intrigued me. I went to the site he linked to. As I looked at the site I wondered if I wasn’t getting into a chicken and egg scenario. After all, how would I install this program for installing all my others? I checked the documentation part of the site. Strangely, no info on how to install. Perhaps if I just download the source or package. This turns out to be as easy as installpkg and the file I just downloaded. Now to see how easy it is to install OpenOffice.org.

[caption id=“attachment_3004” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“sbopkg starts”] [/caption]

so I went into search search and searched for OpenOffice.org.

[caption id=“attachment_3005” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“sbopkg OpenOffice.org information”] [/caption]

There were a bunch of options for those who are technical enough. I just went straight for build.

[caption id=“attachment_3006” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“sbopg OpenOffice.org start build!”] [/caption]

I hit start build and off it went.

[caption id=“attachment_3007” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“sbopkg download OpenOffice.org”] [/caption]

It downloaded and proceeded to build the package.

[caption id=“attachment_3008” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“sbopkg done building OpenOffice.org”] [/caption]

Then it was done. It didn’t take that long considering it was in a VM and I was doing a bunch of other stuff on my computer at the same time. And I didn’t see it anywhere in the menus and couldn’t launch it in the commandline. I was about to come back to the blog and talk about how, after so much promise, sbopkg was crap. But then I remembered that sometimes when I would install stuff in FreeBSD I would have to log out and log back in for my terminal to know about it. So, to be on the safe side, I rebooted the VM. And voila! OppenOffice.org!

[caption id=“attachment_3003” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“OpenOffice.org Writer installed on Slackware 13”] [/caption]

It was in the office menu where it belonged and all was right with the world. So, this puts Slackware up a little higher in my mind. Whereas before it was a clear “just use Zenwalk” for most people, I think that with sbopkg, Slackware becomes just that little bit more user friendly. I’m not saying it’s at the same level as Zenwalk yet. I mean, sbopkg was all on the commandline, for example. But whereas before I think I would never have had a Slackware system, sbopkg makes it a possibility.