.rpm vs. .deb

[Syngin]

Hey guys,

My move to Debian is going along ok but I'm a little confused about packages. Since I've only ever used REd Hat before, I've always used primarily rpms.

My question is:

Can I use these with Debian or is that a big no-no considering the architecture differences?

Everything I've grabbed with apt-get is .deb but my servers don't have either pine or pico and I'd really like to have pico back.

I found this program (http://rapidus.linux.tucows.com/system/preview/8026.html) that might be able to help out. Its called ALien. Has anyone used it to port install files?

[mrBen]

Generally I think using .RPMs on a Debian system is a no-no. You should be able to get .deb packages for Pine and Pico, try checking a few other servers.

[Syngin]

Yeah, that's looking more and more like the way to go. Any idea how to get apt's setup to come up so I can swap servers? There was a huge list in there.

[mrBen]

Kerr-ching (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/debian/chapter/appc_05.html)

Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file, by reading the above stuff. Go to one of the Debian sites and you might even get a recommended source list.

[Syngin]

Cheers bud :)

[mrBen]

Originally posted by Syngin:
<STRONG>Cheers bud :)</STRONG>

&lt;Homer&gt;Mmmm.....Bud.....arrrhhhh&lt;/Homer&gt;

http://www.rbfoods.com/budweiser/images/budit.jpg

Anytime :)

[z0mbix]

Also, if you can't find pico, you can use nano or nano-tiny which are almost identical :D

[Strike]

Definitely do NOT use RPMs on a Debian system, even though there is a tool to do it ... UNLESS you have no other choice. The only real reason the tool exists is to comply with the LSB anyway.

[jrcow97]

I'm confused. I just recently installed a debian potatoe. apt is a great tool, but I like rpm a lot too. Is it just a no-no because of style, or will it mess up your system if you use rpm on a debian?

[Ludootje]

to me, rpm is a no-no by default, no matter which distro you use :)

[z0mbix]

Originally posted by jrcow97:
<STRONG>I'm confused. I just recently installed a debian potatoe. apt is a great tool, but I like rpm a lot too. Is it just a no-no because of style, or will it mess up your system if you use rpm on a debian?</STRONG>

Debian wasn't designed to use rpm's as apt is far superior. Believe me, once you've got used to apt/dselect/aptitude, you'll find no need to use rpm's. What package(s) do you have in mind to install that you can't find as a .deb?

[Syngin]

Originally posted by jrcow97:
<STRONG>I'm confused. I just recently installed a debian potatoe. apt is a great tool, but I like rpm a lot too. Is it just a no-no because of style, or will it mess up your system if you use rpm on a debian?</STRONG>

Yeah, apt is sweet and seems much better because it not only gets but installs too. You can run the upgrade command as well and it updates every single package that you have installed. Redhat Network and up2date are nice but they aren't this easy. You may sacrifice a bit of usability if you switch from RH to Debian but Debian seemed to be the way to go if you really enjoy the command line.

Pros and cons for each I guess. In RH's defence, it could auto-detect and use any of my 3 nics but I had to really wrestle to get just one of them to work under Debian.

Slackware will prolly be my next flavor.

Hey, does anyone have any primarily Debian info sites to recommend apart from debian.org and debian planet?

Edit: Oh, btw, after having looked, I don't think there's a Debian copy of Pine/Pico. SOmething about Pico having a strange license the isn't 100% GNU friendly or something. Gonna go with cheeky's idea of trying nano.

[ 03 January 2002: Message edited by: Syngin ]

[ 03 January 2002: Message edited by: Syngin ]

[Frith]

Originally posted by Strike:
<STRONG>The only real reason the tool exists is to comply with the LSB anyway.</STRONG>

What's truly frightening is that they decided not to use the superior debian packages as their so-called 'standard'. Red Hat must have slipped a lot of money into their coffers to have had them make such an incredibly foolhardy decision (I wouldn't be complaining about this so much if I didn't know for a fact that RPMs are pure carp).

[Strike]

As for pine and pico, su to root and do all the following:
apt-get install pine4-src pine4-diffs dpkg-dev
Then
cd /usr/src/pine4
read the README (which says to do this):

dpkg-source -x pine4_4.21-1.dsc
cd pine4-4.21
debian/rules binary
(this step is the actual compilation and building of the deb and will take quite some time)
... and since I'm too impatient to wait and actually build something I won't use, I 'll just tell you that basically you just follow the instructions from there on out and it's really not that bad :)

[z0mbix]

Originally posted by Syngin:
<STRONG>Hey, does anyone have any primarily Debian info sites to recommend apart from debian.org and debian planet?

Gonna go with cheeky's idea of trying nano.
</STRONG>

debianhelp.org (http://www.debianhelp.org) is really useful. Yeah, go with nano. It's almost identical!

[mrBen]

The link I posted above under Kerr-ching is part of the complete on-line edition of Learning Debian GNU/Linux, at O'Reilly which is pretty handy.


Also, IIRC the
Linux Cookbook (http://dsl.org/cookbook/) has a Debian slant.

(At least it still resides in the Debian portion of my Linux links on my favourites list ;) )

HTH

[Syngin]

Originally posted by Strike:
<STRONG>dpkg-source -x pine4_4.21-1.dsc
cd pine4-4.21
debian/rules binary[/b]
(this step is the actual compilation and building of the deb and will take quite some time)</STRONG>

Thanks, Strike, manually installing a .deb was going to be one of my next questions.

Cheers to MrBen and cheeky_zombie for the links too. Going to spend the next bit reading through them. :-)

[Strike]

Originally posted by Syngin:
<STRONG>Thanks, Strike, manually installing a .deb was going to be one of my next questions.

Cheers to MrBen and cheeky_zombie for the links too. Going to spend the next bit reading through them. :-)</STRONG>

For now I'll just suggest dpkg -i &lt;filename&gt; though one of these days I'm gonna set up a set of scripts so that all I have to do to install debs I have on my own HD is to apt-get install them. The only problem I have with this so far is that I haven't found the scripts for creating the files necessary for apt to use local files (it's easy to simply place a file:// URI in your sources.list), but I admittedly haven't looked very hard. Once this is done, I'll probably make some directory like /usr/local/debs and just download them all into there and apt-get install them. This will definitely be a "How I Did It!!!" post once I get it working.

[error27]

Alien (the debian rpm prog) was around long before the LSB decided to standardize on RPM.

I can see why the LSB standardized on RPM instead of .deb. 1) RPM uses dependencies on files instead of on just packages. This makes it theoretically more flexible. 2) RPM is used by more distros and users.

I would generally avoid installing .debs from wierd places and even more so RPMs because those all come from wierd places.

I'm not sure I completely understand RPM. But I generally hear and believe that it is possible to have as high quality RPM's as .debs. .debs appear better because debian has over 1000 developers who just package programs. Also debian has a centralized development which is better than downloading rpms of various random websites. Thirdly debian users test(use) programs as they are being developed and thus .debs are better tested.

[sans-hubris]

Yes, alien is mostly safe. This is what you should use when installing non-free or commercial applications that do not have any deb packages. Alien does a rather nice job of converting from rpm to deb.

[ 05 January 2002: Message edited by: Muad Dib --formerly ndogg ]

[quandary]

You can also try the "checkinstall" utility, which is supposed to be able to build RPMs, .debs or Slackware packages from tarballs. I've only used it once, to build a .deb. It installed the executable to /usr/local/bin instead of /usr/bin, but everything seemed to go OK apart from that.

http://www.asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/#checkinstall