Re: Installing deb packages on top of UNIX

["Noah L. Meyerhans" <frodo@ccs.neu.edu>]

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On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, Jaime Silvela wrote:

>  Hi, I've been using Debian 2.0 for over a year in my home PC and I 
> think it's great. I like it so much that I would like to install it in
> the computer I use in college, which is a SPARC running Solaris, now
> that there is a SPARC Debian.
> 
>  However, they won't give me permission to do it, so I would like to at 
> least install a few .deb packages (gtk+, the compilers...) on top of
> Solaris. Is that possible, or must I get the source code and compile?
> Has anybody tried this?
>  	

You need to compile the packages from source.  Linux and Solaris are
entirely different operating systems.  The SPARC Debian is still using the
Linux kernel.  Solaris uses the SunOS 5 kernel.  Solaris wouldn't have a
clue about what to do with Linux binaries.

You should not have any trouble getting the packages to compile from
source.  However, it probably won't do you any good to build .deb files.
You'll need to compile and install dpkg, and the admins there probably
won't give you access to the preferred system directories, so you'll have
to do some hacking to force dpkg to keep everything contained within
directories that you've got access to.  

Even if you are able to get the necessary directory trees in place for
package installation, the dependencies would really get in the way. For
example, gcc depends on binutils, which depends on ldso.  ldso is the
runtime linker.  It would really not be possible to install the Linux
runtime linker on top of solaris, even if there was some kind of binary
compatibility standard.

noah

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