Swaret

After playing with Ubuntu for a few weeks, and experiencing the apt-get package management system for the first time, I decided I rather liked the ability to find, download and install a package with one simple command. So I set about installing swaret, which is slackware's equivalent.

Since it's not included on the slackware 10.0 CDs, I downloaded it from sourceforge and installed it ("installpkg swaret-1.6.2-noarch-1.tgz").

To set it up I made a copy of the example configuration file to create /etc/swaret.conf which I edited according to the comments and ran "swaret --update" to get a list of packages from the CDRom and slackware mirror sites. Unfortunately this only has the official slackware packages though, so when I tried to test it by installing firefox, it couldn't find it.

So I added one of the mirrors of the linuxpackages.net repositary to swaret.conf, and lo and behold it found firefox. It's quite an old version, so I ended up downloading the normal firefox installer and running that to install it, but at least swaret is working.

It might not have up to date versions of every piece of software I want, but it still has it's place. I've installed Eterm and atk (library needed by firefox) with no problems, and it's much quicker and easier than finding and downloading and installing the files manually.