Setting it up.

Slackware (as at version 12.1, May 1st 2008) has an ancient but very effective installer. However there is some vital software which doesn't come with the distribution - my own list includes

• Emacs - the latest version. Pat Volkerding must be a Vi user because Emacs often lags behind in Slackware. ( Not in 12.1, but I still prefer to build my own customized version) Along with this various Emacs packages
  • Gnus - the news and mail reader - wonderful
  • Auctex - for editing LaTeX files.
  • Muse - for producing these pages and other documents
  • Org mode - believe it or not for organizing !
  • Remember.el - note making software
  • BBDB - the address book
  • Roman-calendar.el, a liturgical calendar.

This may seem like a great deal of work, but it doesn't take long - can get this lot up and running inside an hour - and given that Emacs is the main place where I produce any kind of text, and can often spend all morning, occasionally all day, doing just that, getting the set-up right is important.

• Mplayer - command-line multimedia program.
• Leafnode - a local newserver for Usenet.
• Postfix mail server software - because no-one should have to use sendmail.
• Firefox plugins for various purposes. Its All Text is especially useful.
• Sawfish - a window manager with its roots in Lisp. Fvwm2 is the fallback but Sawfish is prettier!
• a variety of games - for the children you understand ...
• Open Office.

Thankfully the wonderful Slackbuilds site has scripts to enable the generation of proper Slackware packages for at least some of this stuff.

Sawfish

The necessary library rep-gtk will refuse to build without some tinkering with the source code. The problem is that now gtk-2.4 defines 2 functions as const gchar instead of just gchar

The answer is to edit rep-gtk.h and on lines 294 and 297 put const in front of gchar as below

GtkWidget*
gtk_radio_menu_item_new_with_label_from_widget (GtkRadioMenuItem *group,
                                          const gchar            *label);
GtkWidget*
gtk_radio_menu_item_new_with_mnemonic_from_widget (GtkRadioMenuItem *group,
                                          const gchar            *label);

Also edit gtk-compat.c and also add const in front of gchar on lines 68
and 76 like as follows

GtkWidget*
gtk_radio_menu_item_new_with_label_from_widget (GtkRadioMenuItem *group,
                                           const gchar            *label)
{
   GSList *g = group? gtk_radio_menu_item_group (group) : NULL;
   return gtk_radio_menu_item_new_with_label (g, label);
}


GtkWidget*
gtk_radio_menu_item_new_with_mnemonic_from_widget (GtkRadioMenuItem *group,
                                           const gchar            *label)