Thursday, January 21, 2010

Installing package file

There are many different kinds of Linux package files. Most of these are associated with the package managers of specific Linux distributions. Examples are Debian Package files (.deb files), RPM Package Manager files (.rpm files), and Tarballs (.tar files).
This section deals with installing these single files.


Install/uninstall .deb files

These files are Debian packages. The package files associated with Ubuntu have the .deb suffix because of Ubuntu's close relations with the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. You will need administrative privileges to install a .deb file.

To install a .deb file

sudo dpkg -i package_file.deb
 
To uninstall a .deb file
sudo dpkg -r package_name
 

Convert .rpm files to .deb files

Another type of package files is Red Hat Package Manager files which have the .rpm suffix. It is not recommended to install these on an Ubuntu system. In almost all cases, a native Ubuntu .deb package is available. However, if absolutely necessary, an .rpm file can be converted to a .deb package using the program alien. The resulting .deb file will be installed using dpkg as indicated above.
  1. Install the alien package,then on terminal
    sudo alien package_file.rpm

    Install tarballs

    Files with the .tar, .tgz, .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 suffix are package files known as tarballs which are widely used in Linux and Unix.
    If there is no native Ubuntu package available in any of the Ubuntu repositories, you can use the command line to install or uninstall the tarball file.
    The first step will be to uncompress and extract the tarball. If it is a .tgz or a .tar.gz, in a Terminal enter:

    tar xfvz tarball_name
 

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