Package management is an essential part of any Linux distribution. Every piece of software included by Slackware, along with many third-party tools are distributed as source code that can be compiled, but compiling all those thousands of different applications and libraries is tedious and time consuming. That's why many people prefer to install pre-compiled software packages. In fact, when you installed Slackware, the setup program primarily worked by running package management tools on a list of packages. Here we'll look at the various tools used for handling Slackware packages.

The simplest way to perform package maintenance tasks is to invoke pkgtool(8), a menu-driven interface to some of the other tools. pkgtool allows you to install or remove packages as well as view the contents of those packages and the list of currently installed packages in a user-friendly ncurses interface. pkgtool is a convenient and easy way to perform the most basic tasks, but for more advanced work more flexible tools are needed.

While pkgtool scores points for convenience, installpkg(8) is much more capable of handling odd tasks, such as quickly installing a single package, installing an entire disk set of packages, or scripting an install. installpkg takes a list of packages to install, and simply installs them without asking any questions. Like all Slackware package management tools, it assumes that you know what you're doing and doesn't pretend to be smarter than you. In its simplest form, installpkg simply takes a list of packages to install, and does exactly what you would expect. darkstar:~# installpkg blackbox-0.70.1-i486-2.txz Verifying package blackbox-0.70.1-i486-2.txz. Installing package blackbox-0.70.1-i486-2.txz: PACKAGE DESCRIPTION: # blackbox (Blackbox window manager) # # Blackbox is that fast, light window manager you have been looking for # without all those annoying library dependencies. # # Also included in this package is the bbkeys utility for controlling # keyboard shortcut commands from within Blackbox. # # The Blackbox home page is http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net # Package blackbox-0.70.1-i486-2.txz installed. You can of course install multiple packages at a time, and in fact use shell wild cards. The following installs all of the "N" series packages from a mounted CD-ROM. darkstar:~# installpkg /mnt/cdrom/slackware/n/*.txz Removing a package is every bit as easy as installing one. As you might expect, the command to do this is removepkg(8). Simply tell it which packages to remove, and removepkg will check the contents of the package database and remove all the files and directories for that package with one caveat. If that file is included in multiple installed packages, it will be skipped and if a directory has new files in it, the directory will be left in place. Because of this, removing packages takes a good while longer than installing them. darkstar:~# removepkg blackbox-0.70.1-i486-2.txz Finally, upgrading is just as easy with (you guessed it), upgradepkg(8) which first installs a new package, then removes whatever files and directories are left-over from the old package. One important thing to remember is that upgradepkg doesn't check to see if the previously installed package has a higher version number than the "new" package, so it can also be used to downgrade to older versions. darkstar:~# upgradepkg blackbox-0.70.1-i486-2.txz +============================================================================== | Upgrading blackbox-0.65.0-x86_64-4 package using ./blackbox-0.70.1-i486-2.txz +============================================================================== Pre-installing package blackbox-0.70.1-i486-2... Removing package /var/log/packages/blackbox-0.65.0-x86_64-4-upgraded-2010-02-23,16:50:51... --> Deleting symlink /usr/share/blackbox/nls/POSIX --> Deleting symlink /usr/share/blackbox/nls/US_ASCII --> Deleting symlink /usr/share/blackbox/nls/de --> Deleting symlink /usr/share/blackbox/nls/en --> Deleting symlink /usr/share/blackbox/nls/en_GB ... Package blackbox-0.65.0-x86_64-4 upgraded with new package ./blackbox-0.70.1-i486-2.txz. All of these tools have useful arguments. For example, the --root to installpkg will install packages into an arbitrary directory. The --dry-run argument will instruct upgradepkg to simply tell you what it would attempt without actually making any changes to the system. For complete details, you should (as always) refer to the man pages.

We won't go in depth into the details of package formats, but a few words should be given here. In the past, all Slackware packages were compressed with the gzip(1) compression utility, which was a good compromise between compression speed and size. Recently, new compression schemes have been added and the package management tools have been upgraded to handle these. Today, official Slackware packages are compressed with the xz utility and end with .txz extensions. Older packages (and many third party packages) still use the .tgz extension.

The slackpkg is an automated tool for management of Slackware Linux Packages. It was in /extra for the release of slackware-12.1, and since the release of slackware-12.2 it is included in the ap/ series of a base installation. For more information see the man pages for slackpkg(8) and slackpkg.conf(5). Homepage: http://www.slackpkg.org/