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Christopher Negus

"Linux Bible, 2008 Edition: Boot up to Ubuntu, Fedora, KNOPPIX, Debian, openSUSE, and 11 Other Distributions"


While Slackware's packaging tools are a great improvement over just installing from tarballs, those
tools have not yet reached the level of sophistication you get with those available with RPM-based
(Red Hat, SUSE, Mandriva, and so on) or Deb-based (Debian, Ubuntu, KNOPPIX, and so on)
distributions.
When a software package made to add to Slackware requires a library that is not in the standard
Slackware distribution, the developers often build the needed library into the package. If the software
fails, however, indicating a missing library, you can try a couple of things:
 Look in the software package??™s README file for descriptions of the libraries it needs.
 Use the ldd command to determine the libraries a command needs (for example, typing
ldd /bin/cat shows the libraries needed by the cat command).
 Search the Web for the terms ???Slackware??? and the name of the missing library.
As someone comfortable with UNIX and Linux, I find the text-based tools that come
with Slackware helpful and fairly simple to use. If you are coming from a Windows environment,
however, you may find the lack of GUI-based tools and cohesive end-to-end procedures for
setting up features a bit disconcerting.
Because Slackware is not backed up by a big support organization, it has not made much headway
into the corporate enterprise arena.


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