For your convenience, we provide a free repository for use with slackpkg. It should be regarded as experimental, so please bear with us as we are ironing out the kinks. At the same time, we are already using it, and we love it. Still, read this entire section before making a switch, since our repository differs from the stock in several important ways.

To switch to the new repo, you have to

1. edit /etc/slackpkg/mirrors to use our repo,

   http://freeslack.net/fxp/slackware64-14.1/

2. uncomment the SLACKKEY line in /etc/slackpkg/slackpkg.conf and change it to

   SLACKKEY="Connie Dobbs (Free eXpansion Pack for Slackware)"

3. obtain our signing key (for example, with slackpkg update gpg) and force slackpkg update regardless of the ChangeLog state

Non-free packages were removed and replacements are provided:

1. linux-libre-headers replaces kernel-headers, and they collide in /usr/include
2. linux-libre-source replaces kernel-source, and the source is delivered as a single tarball, so no collision
3. linux-libre-image replaces kernel-huge, kernel-generic, and kernel-modules, with symbolic links pointing to the generic image, and no collisions with the stock

Our kernel build scripts are found in fxp/tools/linux-libre-slackbuild/, and we hope you will find them useful for manually upgrading your kernel.

The rest of the packages in our repository are unmodified official binaries, so you can think of this as a deblobbed mirror.

The repository omits some things related to installation, since they were never considered until now. Still, we were able to boot from the stock DVD, pick our repository as the source, make a full install, and boot into a fully free OS (sans slackpkg configuration). Be advised that LILO had to be configured manually, so this is not something we recommed you do unless you really want to help us with testing.

Our current plans include deblobbing -current as well as future stable releases of Slackware x64. We are aware of x32, but see no reason to proceed without user demand. We have no plans to support releases older than 14.1, but user demand can change this as well. We also wish to improve the situation with the installer, going may be as far as producing free DVD and USB media. Finally, we have plans for expanding the repository with auxiliary packages beyond the base install. As it stands, we are happy to defer all technical decisions to the Slackware core development team. We have absolutely no plans to mess with the base collection aside from the minimal changes needed to replace the essential non-free components, and we are basically done on that front. We may one day try to bootstrap Slackware (that is, rebuild everything from scratch).