teTeX Distribution in Slackware

The teTeX project has been dead since May 2006, when Thomas Esser announced he would not maintain it any more. See http://www.tug.org/tetex/ for information about this.

At the time, XeTeX was available only for Mac OS X; indeed it was added to TeX Live only in the 2007 release (see Section 9.1.4 of the TeX Live manual), so it's not surprising that what you get from Slackware doesn't have it.

In the last seven years, TeX distributions have grown and there are many packages that weren't available in 2006; many have been updated and also the binaries have been rebuilt and debugged several times.

So my advice is to install TeX Live 2013 from TUG

The distribution installs into its own tree, under /usr/local/texlive, so it won't interfere with the system. Just make sure your PATH variable contains

/usr/local/texlive/2013/bin/<arch>

(where in your case <arch> stands for x86_64-linux, probably).

I usually advise to make a symbolic link

ln -s /usr/local/texlive/2013/bin/<arch> /usr/texbin

(or /usr/local/texbin, if you prefer) and to add /usr/texbin to PATH, so when a new release is installed, it's sufficient to recreate the right symbolic link, instead of changing the configuration files that set PATH.