Re: installing dpkg

[Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com>]

* Inuk You <i-yu@melcoinc.co.jp> [2007-10-19 10:21]:
> What I'm trying to do is using dpkg in my system which is not debian. But I 
> don't want to make the system be debian because should maintain the current 
> system.
> I just wish to use 'apt' with unchanging the system.
...
> If what I'm trying to do is not a good idea, anything else?

Yeah, I don't think it's a good idea.  Once you get dpkg to work, you
will run into lots of other problems because of dependencies.  e.g.
most .deb packages depend on glibc and even though I'm sure you have
libc on your system, dpkg/apt will not know about it since you didn't
install a .deb package of glibc.

If you want to keep your current system but also install .deb
packages, I recommend one of the following:
 - don't install .deb packages with dpkg, but simply use dpkg to
   extract the contents of the .deb (dpkg -x)
 - create a Debian chroot on your system, i.e. you would keep your
   current system but you'd also have Debian in a self-contained
   environment (the chroot).  You can use debootstrap to create such
   an environment or you could simply download a tar ball of Debian,
   extract that somewhere on your filesystem and then enter it with
   "chroot".  If you want to do this, you can use the tar ball from
   http://people.debian.org/~tbm/nslu2/etch/base.tar.bz2

-- 
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/