Using dpkg to install Debian?
Hi there. I have a couple of questions, the first of which is: is it
possible to install *components* of Debian without having to totally
blast away all of the Slackware garbage I have now? The version I have
is old enough that it's due upgrading anyway, and I'd like to switch to
Debian piecemeal 'cause of the package stuff being so much easier. But I
don't want to overwrite everything, because I don't want to break the
stuff I have right now and because I don't want to spend thirty hours on
the net downloading everything. :)
I assumed that the logical approach would be to download the source to
dpkg and dpkg-ftp, install them, and then install some of the more
critical pacakges via ftp. After *finally* locating dpkg-ftp, I
recompiled everything on my Slackware machine. (This might be stupid, I
don't know. Does the Debian elf format differ from the Slackware elf
format? i.e., did I *have* to recompile, or can I just grab the
binary-i386 stuff?) configure ran fine except for one error: it was
unable to determine my architecture. Now, this is kind of strange. When
I accidentally tried to run it on a sun4c, it claimed an error with dpkg
on line one of configure (?), looked like a shell error, but on my Linux
machine it just gave me something about CC not being found.
Anyway, I tried make anyway, which of course didn't work. But I edited
config.h and manually set ARCHITECTURE to "i586". (Should this be
i386?) After that, compile worked fine for everything except dselect,
which died on a bunch of ncurses include files. After doing some
symlinking and changing some strange functions to ncurses ones, it
compiled but wouldn't run. (It'd run, but nothing happened. Looks like
I broke ncurses in the process of getting dselect working.) Anyway, dpkg
seems to work mostly fine once I made a /usr/doc/copyrights directory for
the FSF GPL.
Soo... I tried running dpkg -i on dpkg-ftp_whatever-version-it-is.deb,
and it gave me the following error:
dpkg: failed to open package into file `/var/lib/dpkg/status' for
reading: No such file or directory
I'm pretty much a Debian newbie, so I really don't know what I should
do. Hell, I don't even know if dpkg -i installs stuff (although the fact
that it's the same as dpkg --install would seem to imply that), not for
sure. I'm running it as root. Doing a dpkg --update-avail Packages
works fine (once I figured out that you're supposed to gunzip it... drr)
and gives me a dselect-like output.
I've been over the FAQ, both the old and the new, at least thirteen times
and saw nothing of relevance. Do I need to do a 'touch
/var/lib/dpkg/status' or something? What's the file *for*?
Thanks, and I'm sorry this got so long. I know I'm asking for it by not
just backing up all the stuff on my hard drive, but downloading 60
megabytes of software really just isn't an option, and neither is
spending the money to get Debian on CD-ROM. (I'm broke.)
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Barid Bel Medar icarus@berkshire.net
Knights of the Cosmos Shayol Ghul Resort and Health Spa
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"I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because
someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at
the top." - English Professor, Ohio University
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