Ubuntu|Installing using an RPM file

Installing using an RPM file September 23, 2005

Posted by Carthik in administration, applications, ubuntu.
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If you have an rpm file for a package you wish to install, and if you cannot find a .deb debian package in any of the Ubuntu repositories or elsewhere, you can use the alien package converter application to install the .rpm file.

Alien is a program that converts between the rpm, dpkg, stampede slp, and slackware tgz file formats. If you want to use a package from another distribution than the one you have installed on your system, you can use alien to convert it to your preferred package format and install it.

Despite the large version number, alien is still (and will probably always be) rather experimental software. It has been used by many people for many years, but there are still many bugs and limitations.

Alien should not be used to replace important system packages, like sysvinit, shared libraries, or other things that are essential for the functioning of your system. Many of these packages are set up differently by Debian and Red Hat, and packages from the different distributions cannot be used interchangably. In general, if you can't uninstall the package without breaking your system, don't try to replace it with an alien version.

Instructions for Installing RPM Files Using Alien

Installing Alien

You can install alien itself from the Ubuntu Universe repository by adding the repository to your list of sources and doing:

$sudo apt-get update
$sudo apt-get install alien


Installing the .rpm file

To install the .rpm file, you first need to convert it to a .deb file which can be installed on Ubuntu.
I assume that you downloaded the package to your Desktop (~/Desktop is the directory)
You can convert the .rpm to a .deb by using the following commands.
$cd ~/Desktop
-This will change the directory to your desktop, where you have the .rpm file.

$sudo alien -k name-of-rpm-file.rpm
- This will convert the .rpm to a .deb.
- The "-k" will keep the version number. Otherwise alien adds a "1″ to the version number.
- Tip: Use Smart Tab Completion to avoid mistyping the file names

$sudo dpkg -i name-of-deb-file.deb
- This will install the .deb package

Try reading the alien manpage for more details on how to convert other kinds of packages and the options available.

Install an RPM Package on Ubuntu Linux

Installing software on Ubuntu usually entails using Synaptic or by using an apt-get command from the terminal. Unfortunately, there are still a number of packages out there that are only distributed in RPM format.

There's a utility called Alien that converts packages from one format to the other. This doesn't always mean that an rpm will work on your system, though. You will need to install some prerequisite software packages in order to install alien, however. These packages include gcc and make.

Run this command to install alien and other necessary packages:

sudo apt-get install alien dpkg-dev debhelper build-essential

To convert a package from rpm to debian format, use this command syntax. The sudo may not be necessary, but we'll include it just in case.

sudo alien packagename.rpm

To install the package, you'll use the dpkg utility, which is the internal package management tool behind debian and Ubuntu.

sudo dpkg -i packagename.deb

The package should now be installed, providing it's compatible with your system.

FreeBSD|Remote access to KDE from a Windows desktop

Remote access to KDE from a Windows desktop

I would greatly appreciate your visit if you take the time to leave a comment or rate this post. Feelings or suggestions will be welcome.

OpenSUSE is a nice Linux distribution because of its administration tool called YaST. Even if you use openSUSE in text-mode only, YaST is a very friendly system management tool. However, some of us still like the look'n'feel of a window manager like KDE, and sometimes we do not have physical access to the Linux computer. There are solutions like VNC (which is not secure) and VPN (which is hard to set up) that allows us to access the computer remotely.

Recently, I found a "hidden" way to access KDE from another computer. The computer from where I am accessing KDE has Windows Vista Home Premium installed. The Linux computer that I am accessing uses openSUSE 11.1 + KDE. This method, however, should be easy to apply to different system configurations.

The keys to this method are SSH, to make it secure, and the power of the X System, to get KDE working remotely. We are going to forward all the X11 requests from the Linux computer to another computer using SSH tunneling. It sounds easy so far, but the problem comes when we realize that we need an X server to process the requests from the Linux client. Windows, unfortunately, does not have native support for the X System. However, there is a very nice application to add X System functionality to a Windows desktop. It is called Xming and you can download it freely from

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming

The installation is self explanatory. These are the options that I selected for the installation:

Also, instruct the installation program to place a shortcut for XLaunch on the desktop.

Now, the secure part. Make sure that you can access your Linux computer in text mode using SSH. If you can do this, the rest is easy.

First, we need to make sure the SSH server is configured correctly to handle X11 forwarding. I took the following from

http://solaris.reys.net/english/2006/04/x11_forwarding

1. Open the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config
2. The following lines should be uncommented:

X11Forwarding yes
X11DisplayOffset 10
X11UseLocalhost yes

3. Restart the SSH Deamon. In my Linux distribution, you just have to type:

rcsshd restart

The SSH client that I am using is PuTTY (I assume that you need to have it installed). Click on the XLaunch icon on the desktop. This will open the following window:

Make sure you select "One window". Then, click next.

Select "Start a program" and click next.

Enter "startkde" in the text field "Start program". Select "Using PuTTY (plink.exe)" and fill out the fields as if you were connecting through SSH. Also, select "With compression". Then, click next.

Leave this additional parameters as they are and click next.

Your configuration is finished. Click "Finish" to start KDE. It might take a while before it starts, but it will eventually. One of the disadvantages of this method is that it is very slow, partly because it uses SSH to encrypt the communication and partly because the quality of the graphics is perfect. It might not be very convenient to access this from the WAN, unless you have a really fast internet for both machines.

Something that you might prefer doing is starting individual applications instead of the entire KDE desktop. It makes it significantly faster. In that case, you type a different command (like "firefox") instead of "startkde".

A useful application of this is that you can run YaST in graphical mode by using the commands:

yast2 --qt
or,
yast2 --gtk

I hope this post was helpful

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Thanks and best regards,

Stephen Cheng