Really have to use .deb to install anything?
Do you really have to use a .deb installer file for every program you want
to install?
Thing is that I accidently downloaded the wrong netscape (v4.2 or something
similar) and it was 8 megs long so it took 2 hours on my humble 14.4
Anyway, it wouldn't work because the .deb installer is for 3.01 so I got
that version (only 2 megs) and it worked.
I'm sure that if I had a .deb installer for v4.2 (or whichever it is) then
it would work in Debian, but we have to wait for a .deb file don't we??
So is there a way of installing a program in a tar.gz file without a .deb
file? All gunzip gives me is the filename of the zip file minus the .gz bit.
In DOS there's quite a nice zip utility called pkware which unzips a package
of files which includes an executable installer. Surely that's a much better
way of doing things?
Also, this may detract some people from debian linux or indeed any of the
linux distributions in favour of Win95 + NT + DOS, because you can't get the
latest version of anything, and many Win95 + NT + DOS people are very much
concerned with getting the very latest version of a program such as
netscape, but with linux they'll have to install an older version of
everything unless it's supported as a patch or comes with a .deb file.
Does the new replacement for dselect do this??
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