Tristan Day <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | cat is dead." | http://donut.mit.edu/dmaze/ | -- Grant, on Schroedinger's Cat \_____________________________/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]