[aclug-L] Debian package management

["Greg House" <ghouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ok, ignorant question time.  I've only recently started using Debian and
it's package manager is confusing me.  I can get dselect to work with the
packages on the CD reasonably well.  Problem is that I can't seem to get it
to find debs I stick in a directory somewhere.

This is my sob story:  Debian 2.0.2 shipped with XFree86 3.3.2.3 (or
something such) and I need the absolute most current (3.3.3.1) to get
support for the video card I'm using (Diamond Speedstar A50 (AGP)).  I had
RedHat on this system last week and it got wiped and I decided to use Debian
instead.

This whole deal's been a real headache since I started.  I checked the
supported cards list at www.xfree86.org before I bought this thing, and it
said it was supported.  But what they didn't tell me was that support for it
has only recently been added and it's not very good yet.  Ok, so I find the
rpms for 3.3.3.1 on RedHat's ftp site.  Not a big problem.  I fight with the
Zip drive (see last msg...) 'cause the machine I'm installing on isn't
networked.  Put them in and then I have to disable all the hardware
acceleration and stuff the card does to get it to work at all with X.  I'm
less then pleased...

Enter Windows98.  This isn't my machine, the owner wanted it to dual-boot
Windows.  I'd already installed Linux and when I install W98, it trashes my
Linux partitions (thank you Bill Gates).  So I install W98 and the drivers
from Diamond and the card looks great.  I can get 1024x768 24bit color and
it looks great.  Back to Linux.

I install Debian instead of Red Hat, then go searching for debs for XFree86
3.3.3.1 at debian.org.  Gee...there aren't any!  How convenient...  Oh wait,
there's a utility on debian to use rpms, I think I can use the rpms I
already have...  So I go hunting and find the alian utility, looks great.  I
find iti on the CD and install it.  Pop in the rpms and it complains that it
can't install the deb it created from the rpm.  Um...can't tell exactly why,
very cryptic.

Ok, so I can't use the rpms.  That means I have to go back to the tarballs
from xfree86.org and bypass the package manager.  Ugh, don't really like
that...but I'm getting impatient and so is the guy this system's going to.
For some reason, I was thinking Debian was using glibc, so I download that
version.  By that time it's late and I don't want to fight with the zip
xfer, so I leave it.  The next night is the ACLUG meeting, where I hear that
Debian is based on libc6, not glibc.  Great, got the wrong tarballs.  So I
grab the ppa zip drive and take it to work with me.  In poking around the
Debian mailing list archives,  I found where one of the Debian developers
had built (preliminary) packages for 3.3.3.1, ok, I decide to give them a
try instead of bypassing the package manager.

dselect is just totally counterintuitive to me for doing something like
this.  What happened to something simple like "rpm -U <package-file>"?  I
guess I could use dpkg, but it doesn't appear to have an upgrade package
option, just remove and install.

Oh yeah, and the Debian packages have debs for a whole bunch of adjunct
functions so after weeding out the X servers I don't need, I still have have
36 debs that need to be installed.  All of which are probably already
installed in a previous incarnation.  Do I have to do every one of these one
at a time?  What a pain.

Enough whining...  Can someone tell me how to make dselect find these things
and install them?

Oh yeah, if anyone wants deb packages for XFree86 3.3.3.1, they're at
http://master.debian.org/~vincent/xfree-3.3.3.1/

Thanks,
Greg

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