Sbopkg is a command‐line and dialog‐based tool to interact with the SlackBuilds.org repository, a collection of third‐party SlackBuild scripts to build Slackware packages.

Here are the steps for installing the latest version of sbopkg with Slackware.

1. Download the latest Slackware package from https://www.sbopkg.org/downloads.php using whatever method you find most convenient. At the time of this writing the latest version is https://github.com/sbopkg/sbopkg/releases/download/0.38.2/sbopkg-0.38.2-noarch-1_wsr.tgz. I will use that version in the commands below. If the version has changed, you would use the new filename in the commands. You can also use wget <packagename> to download it directly.

I find it annoying not having a CTRL key available for both hands so I tend to swap the Command and CTRL key settings on my 2012 “Slackbook”.

1. Launch a terminal
2. Edit the X11 Keyboard Extension

# vim /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc

3. Make the following changes. Ensure your file looks like this:

key <LCTL> { [ Super_L ] }; key <LWIN> { [ Control_L ] }; ... key <RCTL> { [ Super_R ] }; key <RWIN> { [ Control_R ] };

I recently bought an Epson ET-3850 printer from Costco to replace my HP OfficeJet which was about 10 years old and the family was starting to have issues with establishing a wi-fi connection to it on their Windoze laptops. It took quite a while to setup. The Epson seems to be doing the job. Time will tell, however I discovered that setting it up for Slackware would also take a bit of effort. Drivers are only available on the Epson website in RPM or DEB format so I had to create a Slackware package to install it. Here’s how I went about doing that.

On a recent episode of Hacker Public Radio, the host, Lee listed several note-taking apps that he had tried to use. One of them was Joplin which I have been using for several years now. I feel that it is probably one of the best note-taking apps available that:

• Supports Markdown
• Is cross-platform
• Supports vim keyboard mappings (I can’t live without this)
• Integrates with multiple cloud storage environments.

I use it on a daily basis for almost all of my notes but it also supports checklists on my iPhone, iPad, Windoze laptop, and all of my Slackware devices (desktop and laptops). Give it a try!

You should find a file in /var/log/packages for each SlackBuild that you have installed. You can distinguish the SlackBuilds package from standard Slackware packages by the substring SBo embedded in the filename. So you can create a list of all of the SlackBuilds installed on your machine by just doing an ls *SBo* in that directory.

ls /var/log/packages | grep SBo

or

ls /var/log/packages/*SBo

If you are using elilo with Slackware, after running the slackpkg --upgrade-all script and you see that a new kernel was installed, you need to run the following commands to move the latest kernel to its proper location in order to boot:

geninitrd cp /boot/vmlinuz-generic /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/vmlinuz cp /boot/initrd.gz /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/initrd.gz

Slackware was the first Linux distribution that I ever used but I was always curious and did a lot of distro-hopping from Slackware, Caldera, Turbo Linux, Mandrake, Red Hat, Ubuntu, multiple Ubuntu derivatives, then Fedora for quite a while until I finally settled on…(drum roll please)…Slackware! Yeah, I’ve come full circle.

One of the reasons why I was doing so much hopping around is that I was never really happy with something about the distribution that I was currently using. Maybe it was the default colors (Ubuntu, come on with all of that orange stuff), choice of default software, difficulty with setting it up. Whatever. With Slackware it was always the (lack of) a decent package management system. That is until I found “sbotools”.

I’ve been looking for a way to install a minimal version of Slackware (current) in a VM and the smallest that I’ve safely come up with so far is this:

• Package group A
• Package group AP
• Package group D
• Package group F
• Package group K
• Package group L
• Package group N

I will try to get it smaller but I need this startup environment for another experiment so I’ll settle for this. Yes, it is still a wopping 12GB. Geez…

What is KDbg?

From the homepage:

KDbg is a graphical user interface to gdb, the GNU debugger. It provides an intuitive interface for setting breakpoints, inspecting variables, and stepping through code.

KDbg requires KDE, the K Desktop Environment, but you can of course debug any program.

Here’s how to install it on Slackware 15 but this should work on any system that has KDE:

$ git clone -b maint https://github.com/j6t/kdbg.git $ cd kdbg/ $ cmake . $ make $ su -c "make install"

Per the manpage: Mimic is a command line tool for synthesizing speech from text. If outfile.wav is omitted mimic will output the utterance using the computer sound card.

Mimic is based on flite and strives to extend functionality and add more languages while keeping the application fast and light.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

$ git clone https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic1.git $ cd mimic1/ $ ./dependencies.sh --prefix="/usr/local" $ ./autogen.sh $ ./configure --prefix="/usr/local" $ make $ make check $ su -c "make install"