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 ๐
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.
You could try to use alien to convert the RPM to DEB. It just may not be 100%.
@Gadwil I have not used that before is it relatively easy to use?
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.
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