This is my first tutorial about Linux, my favorite operating system. One of my favorite distribution is Slackware. For Slackware users, they might be very familiar with Xfce, the light and simple but great desktop environment, which always bundled in Slackware installer ISO. Although Slackware has KDE that really polished, I still like to use Xfce because of its simplicity and less memory usage than KDE. Now, let's see how to enable creating archive by right clicking in Slackware with Xcfe desktop.

Thunar the File Manager

Thunar is the default file manager for Xfce, just like the Dolphin in KDE, Nemo in Cinnamon, or PCManFM in LXDE. When you are using KDE in Slackware you will find it very easy to extract the archive file or compress the folder or file into an archive file because Dolphin is integrated with Ark, the archive manager for KDE.

It is a different case in Xfce. By default we can't extract or create archive just by right clicking in Thunar. But we just need to install two applications, xarchiver and thunar-archive-plugin, to made that works.

Slackbuild

Slackbuild is a script that we can use to build a Slackware package from source and then we can install that package using installpkg command. There are a lot of Slackbuild scripts in slackbuilds.org which we can use to add more applications to our Slackware system.

So, to install xarchiver and thunar-archive-plugin we just need to search them at slackbuilds.org then download the Slackbuild script and the source code of the application which link is also provided the Slackbuilds website.

Compiling and Installing

When we have downloaded the Slackbuild script, we just need to extract it and then copy the tarball source code inside the folder where the Slackbuild script stored. And then we can run the Slackbuild to compile the source code and package it into Slackware package. The compile process will take some time depend on your hardware specification. Just wait until it finished.

The output file will be stored in /tmp folder so we can install it from there using Slackware package management tool.

tar -xvzf thunar-archive-plugin.tar.gz
cp thunar-archive-plugin-0.3.1.tar.bz2 thunar-archive-plugin
cd thunar-archive-plugin
./thunar-archive-plugin.SlackBuild
cd /tmp
installpkg thunar-archive-plugin-0.3.1-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz
 

Do the same for the xarchiver.

tar -xvzf xarchiver.gz
cp xarchiver-0.5.4.tar.bz2 xarchiver
cd xarchiver
./xarchiver.SlackBuild
cd /tmp
installpkg xarchiver-0.5.4-x86_64-1_SBo.tgz
 

Now we will have the create archive option available when you do the right clicking on a folder or file.