I mentioned checkinstall last year as a handy little tool to create Slackware packages out of source. If you want precompiled Slackware packages, you can always rush over to linuxpackages.net and find a good deal of packages precompiled for various Slackware releases.
Official Slackware packages are compiled against Slackware releases using automated bash scripts called SlackBuilds. Each package has one SlackBuild which can be used to automate the task of compiling and producing any version of that package against any release of Slackware. Note I used the words ‘compiling’ and ‘producing’. Yes. SlackBuilds not only compile the packages from source, but also create Slackware packages, which can smoothly be installed via the installpkg utility.
Today, I am going to introduce SlackBuilds.org. SlackBuilds is a project being maintained by a small group of people, some of whom you can find on irc.freenode.net (at ##slackware channel). The goal of the SlackBuilds project is to build and maintain SlackBuild scripts for most used packages that don’t ship with official Slackware. If you want a certain package, go to SlackBuilds, download the package’s source, its SlackBuild script, and run the SlackBuild script. The script, after finishing up, produces a Slackware package compiled against your Slackware release. You can install that package quickly with installpkg. Neat. Isn’t it?
I recently compiled and installed Open Office and unrar through SlackBuilds. Not considering the time it took for the humongous Open Office to compile, everything went so smoothly. I think serious Slackware users should give SlackBuilds a good look.
Libel 