On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 06:26:46PM -0700, pesoy misak wrote:
I am wondering about FreeBSD tgz binary packages is compatible with linux distros such as debian or fedora. and also can i just unpack the bsd package and run them on any of these two linux distros
No. Explanation follows. BSD *.tgz binary packages are gzipped tar files containing a number of control files (each has a name starting with '+') and then the stuff you actually want installed. The +CONTENTS files may contain several @cwd directives which change where different files in the archive get put, so you can't always just untar in /usr/local. (In order to build some BSD packages on Linux, I've just had to hack around what looked like a bug in GNU tar where it couldn't make a BSD package because it didn't obey multiple -T arguments.) But even if you could unpack a BSD package in the right place, it will almost certainly not work for you. One reason for this is that the BSD package will almost certainly expect you to have appropriate libraries installed on your machine. Most of these libraries will be part of the BSD base system, and are not available as or in packages. Your Linux libraries will not be adequate. BSDs also have different system calls from Linux and from each other. Unless you have a Linux kernel which knows how to emulate FreeBSD sufficiently to handle its system calls, you'll be in trouble, even if you could copy the right libraries in. As a side note, I will say that all the BSDs successfully emulate most of Linux, but I've not heard any suggestion that Linux is <adjective> enough to reciprocate. I build Linux stuff on BSD from time to time. -- Christopher Vance -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
