Re: Really have to use .deb to install anything?
Tristan Day <GreenSideburns@csi.com> writes:
TD> Do you really have to use a .deb installer file for every program
TD> you want to install?
Only if you want to be able to deal with the program using the Debian
package manager later.
TD> Thing is that I accidently downloaded the wrong netscape (v4.2 or something
TD> similar) and it was 8 megs long so it took 2 hours on my humble 14.4
TD>
TD> Anyway, it wouldn't work because the .deb installer is for 3.01 so I got
TD> that version (only 2 megs) and it worked.
TD>
TD> I'm sure that if I had a .deb installer for v4.2 (or whichever it is) then
TD> it would work in Debian, but we have to wait for a .deb file don't we??
There's a Netscape 4.0 installer in the upcoming Debian 2.0 release.
The installer was in the "unstable" version of Debian for quite a while.
TD> So is there a way of installing a program in a tar.gz file without
TD> a .deb file? All gunzip gives me is the filename of the zip file
TD> minus the .gz bit.
Under Unix, two separate programs do the work that DOS's pkzip does.
tar takes multiple files and stuffs them into a single file. gzip
takes that single file and compresses it. Probably the easiest way to
deal with .tar.gz files is with tar:
View a .tar.gz file: tar tvzf <file>.tar.gz
Expand a .tar.gz file in current directory: tar xvzf <file>.tar.gz
TD> In DOS there's quite a nice zip utility called pkware which unzips
TD> a package of files which includes an executable installer. Surely
TD> that's a much better way of doing things?
There's a couple of things wrong with this concept that package
managers in general are supposed to fix. Say you're trying to install
MegaFoo, which needs the BarBaz library to run. Under Windows, every
program that needs BarBaz includes BARBAZ.DLL and tries to install it,
so you either get n-billion different copies of it or one copy (in
C:\WINDOWS, probably) that only works with some of the programs that
need to use it. The Debian package manager, dpkg, deals with this by
making every library be a separate package. You can't install the
megafoo package until you install libbarbaz1. Using a package manager
also makes it possible for programs and libraries to be cleanly
deleted (i.e. dpkg --remove megafoo). How many different programs are
there to do this on Windows? :-)
TD> Also, this may detract some people from debian linux or indeed any
TD> of the linux distributions in favour of Win95 + NT + DOS, because
TD> you can't get the latest version of anything, and many Win95 + NT
TD> + DOS people are very much concerned with getting the very latest
TD> version of a program such as netscape, but with linux they'll have
TD> to install an older version of everything unless it's supported as
TD> a patch or comes with a .deb file.
Debian usually maintains two distributions, one of which is a "stable"
distribution (i.e. Debian 1.3, "bo") which _works_. Maybe the
software's a little older than it could be, but you know it's not
broken. The other release is "unstable", which has the newest
versions of everything. It's not guaranteed to work, though, and
isn't really suitable for running your corporate web server since
things can change on a day-to-day basis. (Right now there's also
"frozen", which is in testing to become the new "stable" release.)
(Thought: normally Debian gets released about every three months,
IIRC. The 1.3->2.0 update is taking a while because of the updated
GNU C library, going towards eight months. Which M$ software gets
updated that often? :-)
If you want to install your own programs from .tar.gz files, you
should install them under /usr/local so they don't conflict with
things dpkg tries to install. It's worth noting that most Linux
programs come as sources and need to be compiled; a lot of this
software installs by default in /usr/local.
--
_____________________________
/ \ "The cat's been in the box for over
| David Maze | 20 years. Nobody's feeding it. The
| dmaze@mit.edu | cat is dead."
| http://donut.mit.edu/dmaze/ | -- Grant, on Schroedinger's Cat
\_____________________________/
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