Package Management

From Zenwalk Wiki

This article is part of the Zenwalk HOWTO.

[edit] Zenwalk Packages

Zenwalk uses a package format that is very similar to slackware, most packages you find on slackware should run on zenwalk without modifications. All Zenwalk packages are simple tar.gz-archives that can be opened and inspected via xarchiver before installing. The file install/slack-desc will contain a short description of the software contained in the package. The file doinst/doinst.sh will contain the install-script that is executed after installing. All files that are not in "install/" will be simply extracted to "/".

[edit] Installing Software

There are different tools for different ways of installing packages:

netpkg/xnetpkg - will download and install/upgrade software from official mirrors. It will check dependencies unless you disable it in the file /etc/netpkg.conf.

IMPORTANT (since so many have asked this question or something similar):
Q: Are there any significant differences between the default repos? Are they all updating simultaneously?

A: There are no differences. They are all just mirrors and contain the same packages (apart from the restricted repositories which contain some restricted packages that are not available on the official repositories).

gslapt / slapt-get can be found in [extra] and should work on the latest repo, but may not be as well tested as xnetpkg/netpkg.
pkgtool - a graphical tool to remove packages or install software you have downloaded. It will not check dependencies
installpkg / removepkg / upgradepkg - command line tools that will install/upgrade/remove packages. They will not check dependencies

[edit] Removing Software

All software that is installed will write a file to /var/log/packages/, these files can be sorted in chronological order by using the command "ls -rtl /var/log/packages/". This way you can always see which software has been lately installed on a zenwalk box.

[edit] Important to know:

Neither netpkg nor upgradepkg will not make a difference between upgrades and downgrades.
You can at any time look in the "depfile" that should be on all zenwalk-repositories to check the dependencies for a certain software. It's a simple textfile