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:

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.

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

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

I hit start build and off it went.

It downloaded and proceeded to build the package.

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!

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.