Using SlackBuilds.org Scripts on Older Slackware Versions

Slackware releases before 15.0

The release of Slackware 15.0 brings major changes, the most important of which is likely the inclusion of PAM, elogind, Qt5, Rust, and Python3. This changes a lot of things for SBo scripts that depends on specific Python and Qt version. For python3 specific scripts, we use python3 as prefix, while scripts that works for python2/3 we will simply use python prefix. Qt4 has been dropped from Slackware, but it is now available in SBo.

We also migrated all scripts to use i586 on x86 platform as well as making some adjustment to the template along with providing tool to help package maintainers to validate their scripts before submitting to SBo. Please have a look on sbo-maintainer-tools package.

Slackware releases before 13.0

The release of Slackware 13.0 included major changes, the most important of which is likely the x86_64 port. KDE-4.2.4 is also present in 13.0, which marks the first Slackware release to ship the 4.x series. All things considered, unless you're attempting to build something that links the more recent qt and kde libraries, you'll probably be more successful than not in running the 13.0 scripts on older Slackware releases. As always, though, individual results may vary, and you're on your own. :-)

Slackware releases before 12.0

The release of Slackware 12.0 included some major changes; the GNU compiler suite (gcc) was upgraded to version 4.1.2, the GNU C Library (glibc) was upgraded to version 2.5, the X Window System was upgraded to the "almost 7.3" modular release, and many other core parts of the system were also upgraded to the latest versions. As part of these upgrades, X is now in /usr instead of /usr/X11R6 (although symlinks are present for compatibility) and KDE is now in /usr instead of /opt/kde.

Due to the changes above, and because we have scripts for the Slackware 11.0 release on our site, we do not recommend attempting to use any of the 12.0 scripts on previous releases. You certainly may attempt to do so, and they might very well work; however, you should not expect any support from the SlackBuilds.org project team if you choose to ignore this advice.

Slackware releases before 11.0

The release of Slackware 11.0 saw a major upgrade of the GNU compiler suite (gcc); Slackware 10.2 shipped with gcc 3.3.x, and Slackware 11 shipped with gcc 3.4.x. Advantages of the compiler upgrade really aren't of any importance for the purposes of this page, so we won't go into those; however, one of the changes surrounding this upgrade is important:

  • Usage of the -mcpu flag was deprecated in gcc 3.4.x and is obsolete (non functional) in gcc 4.x
  • The -mcpu flag was replaced by -mtune in gcc 3.4.x
  • Versions of gcc prior to 3.4.x do not support the -mtune flag (they don't know what it is - it was introduced in 3.4.x, remember?) :-)

Modifying our scripts to work with older (pre-Slackware 11.0) versions of gcc is quite simple; follow these instructions:

  1. Open the SlackBuild script in your favorite text editor.
  2. Find the lines that look something like this:

    if [ "$ARCH" = "i486" ]; then
      SLKCFLAGS="-O2 -march=i486 -mtune=i686"
    elif [ "$ARCH" = "i686" ]; then
      SLKCFLAGS="-O2 -march=i686 -mtune=i686"
    fi

  3. Change each occurrence of "mtune" to "mcpu" in those lines; it should look something like this when you're finished:

    if [ "$ARCH" = "i486" ]; then
      SLKCFLAGS="-O2 -march=i486 -mcpu=i686"
    elif [ "$ARCH" = "i686" ]; then
      SLKCFLAGS="-O2 -march=i686 -mcpu=i686"
    fi

  4. Save the file and exit your editor.

You can now follow instructions as given in our Usage HOWTO.

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