On 10/16/07, Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 10/16/07, Tyson Sawyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > What if I want to rebuild a package on a different architecture ... > > There's an architecture that might use .deb packages but the Debian > distribution *doesn't* support? Come on, Debian is the NetBSD of > Linux distributions. :-) Just use apt-get(1) to install the binary > package from the repository.
Not quite. ...or so it seems to me. It seems that a 64bit G5 Mac needs to run a 64 bit kernel. it also seems that the mainstream distributions prefer to provide 32 bit user libraries and applications. I don't know if that's because enough libs/apps are not 64 bit clean or what, but that seems to be the case. Gentoo may be the exception, but I really wanted to use Ubuntu. I started using Linux with SLS and then Slackware. ...but I have better things to do than configure and setup linux boxes. I very much prefer to spend my time using my computer rather than build/administer it. ...so I wanted a strongly mainstream distribution that just works. The problem is that a 64 bit kernel supports 32 bit apps by having a special syscall entry that converts from 32 bit to 64 bit and then chaining the call to the 64 bit handlers. The problem is that the 32/64 bit conversion is not straight forward and in some cases may not be possible (or something like that) and so not everything is supported. Quite specifically, printing to USB printers is not supported from 32 bit apps. I should note that this limitation is not well publicized and it took quite a bit of sleuthing and a bit of browsing in the kernel sources to figure it out. I spent some time first trying to figure out why printing didn't work. Then I spent some time trying to figure out how to rebuild enough packages as 64 bit to have 64 bit print services (cups, etc). I had no trouble building a 64bit app, but there where very few 64 bit libs and so the task of getting everything that I needed in 64 bit was quite large. ...esp. since I was unable to find anything that seemed like the equivalent of srpm packages and the Maximum RPM book/docs that I once used to learn RPM. In general, I could find lots of stuff on how to install/manage packages, but little to nothing on how to create/rebuild them. I finally gave up and bought a small x86 box to be a print/file server, installed Ubuntu and was done with it. ...but I'd still like to know how to create/rebuild .deb packages. This thread has given me lots of starting points for the next time I get into this. Thanks! Ty -- Tyson D Sawyer A well-schooled electorate being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read Books shall not be infringed. _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
