Zach, On slackware, forget packages once you have the system installed. Grab the source for xyz software and read the install.txt or readme.txt. In most situations it's as simple as ./configure make make install and some have make test That's if the source was set up to work with autoconf. This is true of most software around these days, as for the ones that don't use it, just read the install directions. Usually all that is required is a few tweaks to makefules to get it to build on your system. I can see the convenience of apt and yum and all that, but I can see the detriment too. Knowing how to build everything from source is very valuable, and that's how to get guaranteed compatibility, since you're using your own runtime libraries. Some things require more work to install on slackware, but it doesn't bother me. As they say, engineers will generally keep engineering _forever_ unless at some time you tell them to stop :) Imagine if we could do this and that and this ... -- Doug
