[Sussex] RPM hell

[Jon Fautley]

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On Thursday 14 Aug 2003 11:15 pm, Gavin Stevens wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Having a need to be able to save work in M$ Office formats from time to
> time has got me trying to install an RPM of Star Office 5.2 from an old
> SUSE 7 CD that came with Linux Format.
>
> I've got RPM & Alien installed on Debian. When I try to install (rpm -i
> ...) the RPM of Star Office, I just get a load of failed dependencies. I
> take it from this that I am doing something really crap & missing an
> important step. Unfortunately, man rpm, although giving a good list of
> options, is somewhat opaque about exactly what needs to be done.
>
> Any help would be appreciated. In the meantime, I'll be marvelling at the
> wonderful ease of dselect, apt-get & dpkg.

EEEK! RPM's :(

Firstly, as debian doesn't sync the RPM/apt package trees, you'll almost 
always get loads of failed deps when trying to install an RPM. Stuff like 
'bash', 'sh', and even 'libc'. There are two options, the first, and best, is 
to convert the RPM to a deb package using alien. IIRC, the format is just 
'alien packagename.rpm', which produces 'packagename.deb'. Alien is a great 
little tool, as it'll even create tgz packages for slackware :)

The second option is to just force the installation of the rpm with:
rpm -Uvh --no-deps packagename.rpm

But you *WILL* need to know that all the deps are there else bad things will 
happen.

However, a quicker, better, sleeker, nicer solution for your problem would be 
'apt-get install openoffice.org' :)

Jon
- -- 
Jon Fautley
3a IT Limited - Open Source Answers
http://3ait.co.uk/
jon at 3ait.co.uk
0870 881 5097
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