About the site
This is a Slackware packages site or simply
SlackPack
. The site was intended as just a web interface to Slackware
packages repositories, but it grew to something lot more than that. The software
now offers tools for management of Slackware repositories.
The idea for this site come to the author when he got close to hundred packages, which he wanted to be more manageable, more accessible and more easy to find. Until then the packages were just placed on a FTP server and some of them were registered at linuxpackages . However, the author decided to create its own site and publish the packages mainly there, but still relaying on linuxpackages.net to spread its work.
The author is building packages since the beginning of 2005, because he wanted to keep its Slackware system clean and easy upgradeable. Slackware is a good distribution. But when it comes to software packages you cannot expect to just find them (like it is a case with an rpm based distribution). Because, I have specific needs and I use more software than the official packages provide. Thus, I'm now doing packages for everything that is not available anywhere else or I need some special functionality that is not available in the other packages. I'm open person, so I share my packages to anyone with the hope that they will be useful.
The ambition of the author is to build good packages, though there is no any guarantee that they will work for you (and not even for him :-). Most of the packages are built for the Intel 486 architecture (one exception are packages build from binary releases - 3.47 %). The current distribution is:
Architecture | Count | Percent |
---|---|---|
Architecture independent | 39 | 0.76 % |
Intel i386 | 11 | 0.22 % |
Intel i486 | 1092 | 21.42 % |
Intel i586 | 268 | 5.26 % |
Intel i686 | 46 | 0.90 % |
Intel Itanium 64 | 0 | 0.00 % |
Intel x86-64 | 1074 | 21.06 % |
Thus currently my packages database totals 2530 packages of about 331 different software applications. When I start to build a software package you can count that I will continue building it when new releases come out. And you can always find older versions and builds as well as newest one.
My packages generally follow the requirements of linuxpackages.net and I use their system wide utility script for writing my build scripts. At this time98.35 % of my packages are produced with a build scripts, but this will increase over time, because my latest packages are all build by build scripts. This keep things transparent to users and they can even build the package by themselves if they want to. I publish my sources and include them in the package.
The packages are always build for a specific Slackware official release in this way ensuring the set of dependencies and the work of the packages on the users' systems.
Hope you like the packages and they are useful for you.
Enjoy the site!
Happy surfing ;-)