[Sussex] RPM hell

[Gavin Stevens]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2003 07:46:03 +0000, Jon Fautley <jon at 3ait.co.uk> wrote:


> On Thursday 14 Aug 2003 11:15 pm, Gavin Stevens wrote:
>>
>> 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 :)

Aahh! so that's what Alien is for. Definitely worth a try.

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

This is my goal, but Star Office will serve an immediate need. Anything 
starting "apt-get" appeals. One thing puzzles me though - why wasn't Open 
Office included in Debian 3?

Jon - Many thanks for your words of enlightenment,

Gavin.

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