Installing and running legacy software (was Re: Problem using "dpkg -i")
On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 01:32:07AM -0600, Richard Owlett wrote:
A long time ago I had used Amaya, a HTML editor available at
<https://www.w3.org/Amaya/Distribution/amaya_11.4.7-1_i386.deb>.
I know, it's OLD. But I've used it ;/
I did:
dpkg -i /home/richard/Downloads/amaya_11.4.7-1_i386.deb
Received error message:
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of amaya:
amaya depends on libssl0.9.8 (>= 0.9.8m-1); however:
Package libssl0.9.8 is not installed.
However Synaptic indicates that libssl1.0.2 is installed.
Questions:
1. Can I "fix" the install?
The short answer is: yes, there are several approaches, I'll outline the
skeletons of some below, but they are quite complex and have caveats and
I would not recommend trying these for beginners (not that you are a
beginner...)
If you can source a package for libssl0.9.8, then you could try to
install that before the Amaya deb. However, depending on where you
got it from, you may find that it itself has other package dependencies
that you cannot satisfy in current Debian releases, and would need to
chase down too; if libssl0.9.8 or any other package like this conflicts
with another package that you have installed you could get into
problems, and there's also the issue of libssl0.9.8 being a security
critical package and out of security support.
You could try unpacking the Amaya deb, and seeing whether the binary
within would run even without the dependencies installed. Something
like:
$ dpkg-deb -x ~richard/Downloads/amaya_11.4.7-1_i386.deb some-path
$ ./some-path/usr/bin/amaya
If it complains specifically about libssl0.9.8 upon starting up, you
could experiment to see whether your more recent libssl would still work
in its place, as follows (something a bit like this)
$ cd some-path # where you extracted the deb, above
$ mkdir -p usr/lib
$ cd usr/lib
$ ln -s /usr/lib/i386*/libssl.so.1.0.0 libssl.so.0.9.8
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(pwd)
$ cd ../../
$ ./usr/bin/amaya
If *that* worked, you could investigate repacking the amaya .deb with the
compatibility symlink in it and the dependencies edited, and installing
the result; or, just run it out of the unpacked location above.
However this is awkward, error prone etc.; out of scope for my mail here
but this class of problem is better addressed using container technology
IMHO, like Flatpak (or Docker at a pinch); but the work needs to be done
to prepare containers with legacy dependencies within them for such
software and that has not been done yet so far as I know.
2. Is there a recommended HTML editor in the repository that"
A. simple UI
B. can render the code so I can tell if my changes display
as intended?
I can't answer this question because I am not familiar with a particular
tool that does this, but I would recommend investigating this option
thoroughly before resorting to #1.
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Jonathan Dowland
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ https://jmtd.net
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Please do not CC me, I am subscribed to the list.
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