On Wed, 2003-01-08 at 13:23, Colin Watson wrote: > On Wed, Jan 08, 2003 at 10:36:08AM -0800, Daniel L. Miller wrote: > > Will the Redhat binaries work under Debian? > > Hard to say. Executables will work fine (or can be made to work fine by > installing additional packages, if you happen to get link errors). I get > the impression that this is a kernel module, though, and it's not clear > to me that Red Hat kernels are module-binary-compatible with Debian > kernels. > > There's unlikely to be any harm in trying. If it doesn't work, you'll > know. Having been in a similar position when I first started messing around with Debian, I'll try and give you the "straight" answer about Red Hat stuff. First off, Colin is right about the kernel modules. There's no harm in trying, but don't expect them to work. What I'll try to cover is the right way to go about things like this. Most of the programs you find floating around on the net for linux are usually released in two forms, RPMs and source. Your first instinct then, coming from either a Windows or Mac or even Red Hat or Mandrake background is to download the easiest form of the package and use it. So you download the RPM and use it. And maybe you find out about the "alien" command in Debian that can convert RPMs to DEBs. And that works. But that's the wrong way of going about it. Debian has the incredibly useful and powerful apt system. If you want to find a package, you just type "apt-cache search searchwords", where searchwords are what you want to find, and it shows you matching package names. When you find the packages you want, it's just a matter of "apt-get install packagename". Sometimes, however, there doesn't yet exist a Debian package for a program you want. In that case, I always suggest building from source. Debian has a nice way of seperating compiled from source packages from the rest of the system. They all go into /usr/local/* as opposed to /usr/* or even /*. This way it's relatively easy to get rid of them cleanly in the future. Also, most Makefiles nowadays have an "uninstall" target, so after you compile and install a program, uninstalling it can be done from the same source tree. Finally, to get to the point of the kernel modules, just as with the apt system, it's always best to check what you have before you start downloading stuff. Just about every major piece of hardware nowadays is supported directly in the kernel. If you roll your own kernel it's quite easy to select which drivers you need during compilation. If you run a Debian packaged kernel, it will come with just about every module that could possibly be compiled in the kernel. Then you can just load those modules using modprobe or modconf. If you were to download the RPM of the drivers and use that, it would most likely just place the driver in your kernel modules directory. I hope that makes sense and, more importantly, I hope the above clarifies a few things about starting out with Debian. It's always good to catch bad habits such as using alien before they start. :) Good luck and welcome to Debian. :) -Alex
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