This one time, at band camp, Mick Boda wrote: >I was wondering if there was any resolution on an earlier post about >using apt-get to retrieve and install rpms?
I didn't read the earlier post, but the short answer is "you can use apt-rpm to install RPMs on RPM based systems, such as Red Hat, Mandrake, etc, as long as you've set up apt-rpm properly". apt-get for Debian will install packages for the Debian system that apt knows about. >As you all know by now .... I've just started using debian woody but >need to update my Xfree Version. I was hoping I could "apt-get" them >off my redhat 8.0 CD's (which may as well be useful for something..... >or maybe not) You can't do that. Debian uses the deb package format, and dpkg as the package manager. Red Hat uses RPM format, and rpm as the package manager. You can't just apt-get the RPMs off of your Red Hat CD and install them onto a Debian system, because the package management is different. It's complicated. It probably doesn't make a lot of sense, of course why wouldn't you think you can just install the software from one distribution into another, it's all just Linux in the end, right? It is possible to shoe-horn RPMs into Debian, and vice versa, but it's likely to break your system in subtle ways that both distributions aren't ready to cope with yet, and so the current answer is "Don't do that." I'm sorry I can't give a better answer than that, unless you want a really technical answer :-) But read on, there is hope for those who want XFree86 4.3 on Debian... >I know I need Xinstall, extract, Xbin, Xlib, Xamn, Xdoc, >Xfnts,Xfenc,Xetc,Xvar,Xxserv & Xmod which are TAR.GZ(?) availble from >Xfree for Version 4.3. Daniel Stone has made some unofficial XFree86 4.3 packages for Debian unstable, I don't have a URL handy but I'm sure google knows and I think they're listed at apt-get.org, too. There might even be a backport to the woody release. >If it's better to download the packages, How? I'm using lynx to surf >the net and do my downloading, but when I downloaded Xinstall.sh as >recommended, I got a text file which I couldn't .sh? Where should I >download the files to? I'll read-me some more on the Xfree site, that >should at least tell me how to "install" Xfree 4.3. If yuo can find .debs of XFree86, then installing them with dpkg -i xfree86.deb and so forth is the preferred method. >Lastly I was copying some of Redhat data from a CD, when I typed cp -r >b&w (being the Directories name for black and white photographs), I >recieved a login report?? then "created b". What is the "&" symbol >doing and why doesn't it do it under Redhat? & is a shell special character which means "Do the previous command in the background, and carry on straight away". So what you've done is copy (recursively) a file called 'b', and immediately run the command 'w' which gives you a list of who's logged into the machine right now. I don't know why that wouldn't have done the same on a Red Hat machine, the syntax of the shell is standard across all distributions. Perhaps you were using something like csh on the Red Hat box? (wild guess, never used csh but I know its syntax is different from bash) -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://spacepants.org/jaq.gpg -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
