Linux – Fedora 13 on my laptop and Ubuntu Help needed. – Andrew the Hopeless Techie

Linux – Fedora 13 on my laptop and Ubuntu Help needed.

Fedora 13 โ€“ Installed on my laptop

When I had the issues with my desktop Motherboard and had to install Fedora 13 on my laptop i was generally happy with the change until, i decided to stupidly update to the Fedora 14 alpha. I know that Alpha releases can be buggy and are discouraged from upgrading an existing install, however for what ever reason I decided to ignore this and do it anyway ๐Ÿ™

Well when my machine locked up on me and I failed to be able to get it to be bootable again I decided to re-install, however something happened that caused the Fedora 13 disc to not install. Now being that my desktop was down and I did not have a bootable OS I had no choice but to fall back to Vista Buisness. I had issues with this but you can read more about that in the Windows post later on.

I now have Fedora 13 running under VirtualBox in Windows as I just did not feel like erasing windows and re-installing Fedora again.

Doing this got me thinking that I could try to Install Ubuntu 10.04 as well which on the desktop seems to hate the VM environment.

Ubuntu

While I like the feel of Ubuntu, I do not know my way around it at all with regards to .deb packaging and repository creation.

Yes I tried to make a Debian version of the RPM Repo i have. This proved to be 10000000 times more frustrating then anything i had attempted on Fedora and I quickly began to realize why I had not done this sooner.

While the Repository idea is not looking good right now for Ubuntu I would love to be able to compile an .deb file if for nothing more then to say I figured out how to do it.

What I ask you guys i if any of you happened to also use Ubuntu and can possible point me to a guide that is easy to use toward .deb packaging.

I realize most of the people reading this are Fedora users but I know there are some of you out there like myself that use more then one Distro.

4 Comments

  1. Gadwil

    You could try to use alien to convert the RPM to DEB. It just may not be 100%.

    Reply
    1. Andrew Jamison (Post author)

      @Gadwil I have not used that before is it relatively easy to use?

      Reply
  2. Marc

    I don’t know anything about repo creation; it’s so easy to sign up for a PPA with Launchpad (each user automatically gets 2GB I think) that I’ve only read about it briefly, out of curiosity. Unless you need a local/private repo, a PPA is the way to go.

    The Ubuntu packaging guide starts with https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide/ and covers the basics well enough. PPA documentation is here: https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/

    The Debian maintainers documentation is also comprehensive and should probably be considered authoritative where differences occur. I generally found the details I needed by googling.

    Having no prior packaging experience (I started learning rpm after deb), I also found the “Learning MOTU” series of videos at http://www.youtube.com/ubuntudevelopers useful as a starting point.

    Reply
    1. Andrew Jamison (Post author)

      Thanks for the comments @Marc but a PPA might not work this is basicaly me packaging the source for someone who does not have a .deb package and does not wish to compile said package themselves

      Reply

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