installing rpm and tgz package on a debian box

Debian is a magnificent Linux distribution. The default debian Installation package is .deb. However Debian can also install slackkware .tgz package, because .tgz equals to tar.gz with installation script. So from that fact we can simply install .tgz files by extracting. for example we will install xmms because this package is not available on debian repository. I got xmms package from a slackware 12 dvd now i just have to install it.

tar zxvvf xmms-1.2.11-i486-2.tgz -C /

then we can simply remove /install by typing

rm -r /install

but now we have a problem. xmms window won't come up after invoking. libxmms.so.1 is not found on system. actually the library needed is already available in different filename (libxmms.so.1.3.1)That's just because library naming between slackware and debian different. we can simply solve it by linking the library

ln -s /usr/lib/libxmms.so.1.3.1 /usr/lib/libxmms.so.1

yup, we have successfully installed a slackware .tgz package.


Now let's install rpm package from slackware 12 DVD (rpm-4.4.2.3-i486-2.tgz). we also need to install beecrypt because some files on beecrypt are the dependency of rpm. it's also available on slackware 12 DVD.

tar zxvvf rpm-4.4.2.3-i486-2.tgz
tar beecrypt-4.1.2-i486-2.tgz
rm -r /install

again like the previous problem the names of the library are different. Yup let's solve it

ln -s /usr/lib/libbeecrypt.so.6.4.0 /usr/lib/libbeecrypt.so.6
ln -s /usr/lib/libssl.so /usr/lib/libssl.so.0
ln -s /usr/lib/libcrypto.so /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.0

and now we got the problem solved