The Peek Screen Recorder on Slackware

In Build & Install Slackware Packages Automatically, I took a look at building software on Slackware using SlackBuilds.org and sbopkg, and compared it against other popular package management systems like package management system like yum , dnf , andapt :

yum handles downloading and installing any dependencies for software as well as downloading and installing software itself. The user doesn’t need to care how this works. If all goes well, the end result is that software is magically installed.

Slackware’s package management system ( pkgtool, installpkg, removepkg) is stupid simple. It assumes that you, the system administrator, know your system the best.

That may sound scary and hard, but Slackware gives you a platform and a community that makes doing this kind of thing yourself fairly simple.

I believe that by practicing system administration this way ultimately results in you becoming a more competent, savvy, and educated system administrator.

Sometimes the software you want is not on SlackBuilds.org which means that sbopkg is useless to you.

Also, SlackBuilds.org is only tested against stable releases of Slackware. As I mentioned in my post Using a USB Stick to Install Slackware-Current:

Slackware stable releases have a well earned reputation for being “rock solid”. (Stable Slackware releases have a version number associated with them, i.e. “Slackware 14.2”)

In addition to stable releases, Slackware has a version called “Slackware-Current”, which is where active development happens for the next stable release of Slackware. This can be confusing: despite its name, Slackware-Current is usually not what you want.

Choosing to use Slackware-Current means that you get bleeding edge software, but it has not be as thoroughly tested as a stable release. There is no expectation that Slackware-Current will be “rock solid”. It generally is. But sometimes it isn’t. It’s under active development.

So if you happen to be running Slackware-Current, SlackBuilds.org may not work as you expect.

In Creating GIFs with Peek on CentOS 7, I wrote:

Sometimes it’s much simpler to show someone how to do something on a computer than it is to tell someone how to do it. If I need to show someone how to do something on Linux, I’ve found Peek to be a handy tool. Peek is a “simple animated GIF screen recorder with an easy to use interface”.

The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is an old picture file format that supports animations. It’s the ultimate video format — it’s portable, it’s ubiquitous, and it’s lightweight.

There is a Flatpak Slackbuild for Slackware 14.2, so much of the information over on Creating GIFs with Peek on CentOS 7 should work after first installing Flatpak:

cd ~
mkdir tmp
cd tmp
wget https://github.com/sbopkg/sbopkg/releases/download/0.38.1/sbopkg-0.38.1-noarch-1_wsr.tgz
sudo su
installpkg sbopkg-0.38.1-noarch-1_wsr.tgz
sbopkg -r
sqg -p flatpak
sbopkg -B -i flatpak.sqf
exit

But what happens if you want peek on Slackware-Current? The Flatpak Slackbuild is not going to work for you and you’ll notice on the peek github page that there is no obvious option for installing peek on Slackware.

This is where Slackware gives you a platform that makes it simple to roll your own version of peek. In a world where the first instinct of most Linux users is to run something like apt install peek (and if that doesn’t work, to give up), the Slackware admin’s first instinct should be to attempt to use SlackBuilds.org or sbopkg, and if that fails, take a shot at compiling it yourself. This kind of approach is the essence of what makes open source software great, and compiling things yourself on Slackware is usually simpler than you think.

In the case of peek on Slackware-Current:

git clone https://github.com/phw/peek.git
cd peek
cmake CMakeLists.txt
make
sudo make install

It’s that simple.