Hi there. I have a couple of questions, the first of which is: is it possible to install *components* of Debian without having to totally blast away all of the Slackware garbage I have now? The version I have is old enough that it's due upgrading anyway, and I'd like to switch to Debian piecemeal 'cause of the package stuff being so much easier. But I don't want to overwrite everything, because I don't want to break the stuff I have right now and because I don't want to spend thirty hours on the net downloading everything. :)
I assumed that the logical approach would be to download the source to dpkg and dpkg-ftp, install them, and then install some of the more critical pacakges via ftp. After *finally* locating dpkg-ftp, I recompiled everything on my Slackware machine. (This might be stupid, I don't know. Does the Debian elf format differ from the Slackware elf format? i.e., did I *have* to recompile, or can I just grab the binary-i386 stuff?) configure ran fine except for one error: it was unable to determine my architecture. Now, this is kind of strange. When I accidentally tried to run it on a sun4c, it claimed an error with dpkg on line one of configure (?), looked like a shell error, but on my Linux machine it just gave me something about CC not being found. Anyway, I tried make anyway, which of course didn't work. But I edited config.h and manually set ARCHITECTURE to "i586". (Should this be i386?) After that, compile worked fine for everything except dselect, which died on a bunch of ncurses include files. After doing some symlinking and changing some strange functions to ncurses ones, it compiled but wouldn't run. (It'd run, but nothing happened. Looks like I broke ncurses in the process of getting dselect working.) Anyway, dpkg seems to work mostly fine once I made a /usr/doc/copyrights directory for the FSF GPL. Soo... I tried running dpkg -i on dpkg-ftp_whatever-version-it-is.deb, and it gave me the following error: dpkg: failed to open package into file `/var/lib/dpkg/status' for reading: No such file or directory I'm pretty much a Debian newbie, so I really don't know what I should do. Hell, I don't even know if dpkg -i installs stuff (although the fact that it's the same as dpkg --install would seem to imply that), not for sure. I'm running it as root. Doing a dpkg --update-avail Packages works fine (once I figured out that you're supposed to gunzip it... drr) and gives me a dselect-like output. I've been over the FAQ, both the old and the new, at least thirteen times and saw nothing of relevance. Do I need to do a 'touch /var/lib/dpkg/status' or something? What's the file *for*? Thanks, and I'm sorry this got so long. I know I'm asking for it by not just backing up all the stuff on my hard drive, but downloading 60 megabytes of software really just isn't an option, and neither is spending the money to get Debian on CD-ROM. (I'm broke.) ------------------------------------------------------------------ Barid Bel Medar [EMAIL PROTECTED] Knights of the Cosmos Shayol Ghul Resort and Health Spa ------------------------------------------------------------------ "I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top." - English Professor, Ohio University ------------------------------------------------------------------
