Hi all, thanks for all who have helped me out so far. Slowly, but steadily, I'm getting to know how to do things in debian... My new questions are : How do debian packages work? Everything that came on the cd works nicely : if you keep it that way. My general question in short, is, how to install new .deb packages from the net properly? How to install E, licq, GQMpeg? How to convert rpm to deb properly? (seems most people has rpm dists)
Is there somewhere with a debian-beginner-beginner kind of documentation? I mean, I can't seem to find any docs for how someone is supposed to install deb packages they got on their own, etc. etc.....I looked through support and documentation pages on www.debian.org. Support? IRC (hard when you don't have your computer working, or when you don't feel like wading through lots of messages. And some people are just kind of rude) Documentation pages talks mostly about how to get debian installed.... the following is some stuff I did, and screwed up, that led to these questions so maybe you'll have an understanding of where I'm coming from.. -- I got all my hardware working, even the sound on my OPL-SA3 using the ALSA driver... I started to set my sights on the software side of things: X and windowmaker, and the software to go with it to make it nice and usable. First off, I tried to get the GQMpeg frontend for mpg123 player. There was no .deb package, and I couldn't figure out the dependencies (well, I gave up.. it wasn't very important). Then, I tried to get Licq working, no .deb package either. Couldn't work it out. Then, I tried to get Enlightenment the window manager working. Couldn't get it working. I kept trying to get E to work though... Steps I took: 1. Went to www.enlightenment.org 2. Got the rpm dist 3. Used Alien on the rpm 4. did a dpkg -i on the produced deb 5. dselect, looked at it, and it said it didn't depend on anything and was installed. E depended on a lot of things though... and when I looked at one of the info sections, it showed all the deps, but dselect didn't check it. 6. Decided, fine. I'll try and find a real deb, or some faqs... 7. Looked on the E faq, told me to get the files needed for debian from a "grab table", lots of deb packages were shown there, but they were all broken links. 8. Found that most of the packages were linked to ftp.debian.org, so I manually went there, and grabbed packages with the same name, but different version number.. 9. To make a long story short, I did dpkg -i on all the packages I got, enlightenment was happy, but everything else was not. libc was now a 'u' version, when it was a 't' version before. Everything was screwed up, so I said, whooooooooo.. and deleted the linux partition. 10. Re-installed debian (10th time? 20th?) To save time, I didn't re-install all the packages... just the stuff I seem to use so far. (all the reqs, some of the standard stuff) 11. tried to get my sound working again, couldn't get alsa-driver to compile. 12. dselect, selected 2.0.34 kernel source, installed it. 13. alsa-driver still won't compile. 14. configured the kernel, tried to compiled it, didn't work. missing a86... 15. forgot that I needed bin86 package. Installed that. 16. kernel recompiled uneventfully. didn't do anything with it though because I didn't need it (Had a previously compiled kernelI was using) 15. alsa-driver compiled. 16. alsa-libs compiled 17. alsa-utils failed to compile. Didn't know why. 18. Even though ./configure for alsa-utils didn't fail outright, it said some things weren't found... byacc, bison, etc... 19. I installed those. Realized, most programs probably rely on standard packages. So, I installed all the standard packages. 20. but for some reason, g++ caused a conflict with another standard package.... g++libstd something or another. 21. chose g++ because I needed that. 22. got sound working again, got x working with windowmaker again. 23. tried to get enlightenment working again, used the "ftp access method" in dselect to get new updated package listings. New package listings did not show the deps that E needed. Did a dpkg -a on all the debs I kept from previous installations. Went in, tried to get all the dependencies working before installing the packages. 24. failed miserably. something wrong with libc6 'u' version and libc6 't' version... 25. gave up. spent about 10 hours.
