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As you may be aware, SXEmacs uses the same packaging tools (PUI) as XEmacs. What you may not be aware of is that PUI is useless until you manually install a couple of packages. Yep, that’s right, you can’t use PUI to install packages unless you install some packages first...
Well that was for XEmacs, this is SXEmacs! SXEmacs can bootstrap PUI without needing any packages to be pre-installed. It does so via FFI (Foreign Function Interface) and libcurl.
Your SXEmacs needed to be configured with --enable-ffi when it
was built, and you also need libcurl on your system. Most
Linux distributions have libcurl installed as part of their
standard installation. So you are more than likely good to go
already. But if you are not sure, try:
M-: (require 'ffi-curl) RET
It will not succeed if you don’t have either FFI or libcurl.
Menu: Tools -> Packages -> Set Download Site ->
M-x pui-bootstrap RET
That’s it! What will happen is that SXEmacs will download and install the latest package-index file. Then it will download and install the latest versions of the EFS and xemacs-base packages. Finally, SXEmacs will ask you if you want to install more packages. At this point, SXEmacs reverts back to normal PUI behaviour (using EFS to download the packages).
That wasn’t hard, was it?