Re: [aclug-L] Debian package management

["Greg House" <ghouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Goerzen wrote:


>"Greg House" <ghouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
>> 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.
>
>The easiest way to do this is to snag the tgz for your particular
>server from www.xfree86.org, place it in /usr/local/bin, and update
>/etc/X11/Xserver to use it.


Yeah, looking back, I should have just done that.

<snip of my ignorant babbling...>

>Debian does use glibc.

>libc6 == glibc2 (aka glibc)
>
>so they're the same.


DOH!  Man do I feel like a dope now.

>> dselect is just totally counterintuitive to me for doing something like
>> this.  What happened to something simple like "rpm -U <package-file>"?  I
>
>dpkg -i packagename.deb


Yeah, I figured that one out.  But it has a bunch more options and the man
page for it has this big warning at the start of it saying it's totally out
of date and probably inaccurate and that you should really be using dselect
anyway.  That kind of scared me off.


>> 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.
>
>dpkg -i *.deb
>
>wiill do it :-)

What about dependancies & older versions?  Will it do an upgrade of an
existing package with -i or do you have to go remove the older package
before installing the newer one?

>Get apt.  It really rules!

Got it.  Sorta figured out some about using it in dselect, at least enough
for it to find the debs I'd stuck in a directory.

Now...figuring all that out still didn't really help me a whole lot.  It
seems Vincent's debs had a whole rash of dependancies.  I started fetchinig
the debs from the unstable tree for the things it complained about until I
finally got stuck in a dependancy deadlock.  When I tried to put one of them
in, something else complained that it depended on the OLD version of the
package and I couldn't find an updated version of that out there.  So I
threw up my hands in frustration and reverted back to the stuff on the
original distribution and swapped video cards

(I later found a mail message from a very kind ACLUG member offering to
trade me a card better suited to this system for the Diamond card!  This
list is great!)


Thanks!
Greg

---
This is the Air Capital Linux Users Group discussion list.  If you
want to unsubscribe, send the word "unsubscribe" to
aclug-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx.  If you want to post to the list, send your
message to aclug-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx.