"Linux", you say. "Yes, but which one," your interlocutor asks. "What's the difference?" - you reply.
And the difference between various Linux distributions is quite large. Despite the similarity of OS design principles and the most general commands, in everything else they differ. They differ significantly, so to speak.
This includes the software intended for them differing too. Different paths, libraries, variable names, etc. And even software that works on different distributions - the format of installation files differs.
In this note we'll talk about how to try to install software intended for RedHat-compatible OSes (CentOS, Fedora-core, and RedHat itself) on Debian. More precisely - how to convert RPM installation files for RedHat into DEB files for Debian.
1) First we need the Alien utility. Let's install it.
$ sudo aptitude install alien
2) Now let's convert the .RPM file into a .DEB format file
$ sudo alien --to-deb mysoftware.rpm
3) Install the resulting file
$ sudo dpkg -i mysoftware.deb
You can also tell the utility to immediately install the converted .deb file:
$ sudo alien -i mysoftware.rpm
PS. Of course, this isn't a panacea - not all packages and programs can be installed this way painlessly. And even if it seems to work at first glance - keep a close eye on how this software behaves - it may choke somewhere, or you may need to tweak its configs more deeply than you would have had to in RedHat.
Comments