partedmagic

Installing Software
Overview
There are three basic ways to install software in Slackware: install a pre-build binary package, make your own package, or compile the sources and install the resulting binaries manually. If you need to compile a program from source code, making it into your own package is easy and useful. Here's how these methods work.

Installing Pre-built Binary Packages
To install a package you first need to get the package.

Official packages can be found on the Slackware CD-ROM or the Slackware FTP/HTTP mirrors. The package browser can be found at http://packages.slackware.com/.
Unofficial, community contributed binaries can be searched for at http://slackfind.net/ which indexes the most well-known community repositories and Slackware-compatible spin-offs like http://slacky.eu/ http://salixos.org/ and more.
Usually a package file name ends with .tgz or .txz and looks something like “mozilla-firefox-14.0-x86_64-1.txz”. The more universal naming scheme is “PRGNAM-VERSION-ARCH-BUILD.txz” where ARCH denotes the architecture for which the package was built (examples are x86_64, i486. armv6l, armv7hl, noarch) and the BUILD number is not just used to mark incremental package updates but also allows community packagers to add their own build tag1) which makes them unique.
Make sure you get the Slackware package built for the correct architecture and made for your version of Slackware!
To install the package you need to change to the root user. Run either the command su - or sudo -i and enter your root password. Now run the command

  upgradepkg --install-new your-long-package-file-name
  
You should see a bunch of text running across your screen telling you about the package being installed, and possibly about an old package it might be replacing.

Make a Package
From Source
The recommended way to build packages from source is to use or create SlackBuild scripts.

However, there are other utilities such as slacktrack (part of Slackware itself), src2pkg and checkinstall which automate the package creation process entirely (with a few user inputs), but these are not guaranteed to work with all possible kinds of source projects.

From third-party package formats
Binary packages from other distributions can be converted to Slackware packages by using conversion tools. Although building packages from source is always better, there are some situations which might warrant the use of these tools.

rpm2tgz which is part of Slackware can be used to convert .rpm packages to Slackware packages.
deb2tgz converts .deb packages to Slackware packages.
alien is a tool used to convert packages to and from different distribution package formats.
Compiling from scratch
Some users still prefer the traditional method of compiling from source directly and installing using make install or a similar command.

The generic steps for standard GNU Autotools Makefiles are:

 ./configure
 make
 make install # as root
The configure script may take additional switches to enable or disable features or configure other build options.

Other build systems may involve different steps, depending on how the source project is set up. As always, it is best to read the upstream developer documentation to figure out how to compile and build a program for your system, including which dependencies to fulfill.

Community Repositories
Slackware Team:
Eric Hameleers regular packages; packages with patent restrictions; KDE bleeding edge; multilib
Robby Workman
Wider Community:
Dropline Gnome
Micro Linux Enterprise Desktop (MLED)
MATE SlackBuilds (MSB)
Ponce's Pimp My Slack
http://slacky.eu/
http://salixos.org/
Sources
Originally written by peterwwillis for the SlackDocs Wiki Project
Additional contributions by V.Harishankar
Additional contributions by Eric Hameleers, with input from maciuszek
howtos, software, installing, package management, author peterwwillis
1)
-Well-known tags are “_SBo” (slackbuilds.org), “alien” (Eric Hameleers), “_rlw” (Robby Workman), “ponce” (Matteo Bernardini)-

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12. Best way to install .deb package in Slackware?

13. Welcome to SlackBuilds.org!

The SlackBuilds.org project is maintained by a small group of people, but we want the scripts in our repository to be representative of the entire Slackware user community. There's no way that the few of us can possibly write scripts for all of the extra applications that users want to have, so we depend on YOU to help us out. If there's some application that you use, and we don't have it in our repository already, please consider writing a build script for it and submitting it to us for possible inclusion - see the Submissions page.

One of the frequent criticisms of Slackware is the lack of official packages available. While the official package set provides a good, stable, and flexible operating system (and is quite adequate for many individuals), the fact remains that many users want/need quite a few additional applications in order for it to meet their needs. There are a few well-known third party package repositories, but many users justifiably do not want to install untrusted packages on their systems. For those users, the traditional solution has been to download the source code for desired applications and compile them manually. This works, but introduces another set of problems associated with managing those applications; version updates and such require more of the admin's time than precompiled packages, and lack of notes will often mean that the admin forgot which configure flags were used earlier (as well as any other special issues encountered).

In our opinion, the best solution to this problem is for the admin to automate the compile process using a SlackBuild script. Patrick Volkerding, the maintainer of Slackware, uses SlackBuild scripts to compile the official packages, so it makes sense for us to use the same idea for extra applications we want to add.

Our goal is to have the largest collection of SlackBuild scripts available while still ensuring that they are of the highest quality - we test every submission prior to inclusion in the repository. We do not now nor will we ever provide precompiled packages for any of the applications for which we have SlackBuild scripts - instead, we want the system administrator (that's you) to be responsible for building the packages.