I just posted this step by step tutorial on how to change an rpm package to a deb package. Feed back is welcome, either post in the comments or you can email me at three [at] threethirty [dot] us

Link

Companies are funny. Most of them think that there is only on type of Linux package, and for some reason that tends to be .rpm. Now .rpm are fine if you run OpenSUSE, Fedora, etc. But this is the Ubuntu Help Blog, Ubuntu is based on Debian and Debian uses .deb packages. So what can we do we use alien. Now this will look kinda scary at the begining because this is a command line tool, but I promise this is easy.

Step 1:
First you will have to apt-get alien

and type "y" you need those packages

I was listening to the most recent Distrowatch OGGcast http://distrowatch.com/podcast/dww20070910.mp3
and the host brought up an interesting question, why does Ubuntu win all of the polls? Well here are my reasons why the next top competitors aren't on top.

Suse (SLED and OpenSUSE): No one trusts Novell. People tend to switch to Linux to get away from Microsoft, so why use a partner's distro?!?

Mandriva: I think Mandrivia is just crap, they focus way too much on the "club" (the tossers that actually pay for it) and don't focus enough on community building.

Debian: scary server OS

Following the recent launch of Fedora 7, I spoke to Max Spevack, Fedora Project Leader, about how Fedora and Red Hat work together, and what lies ahead.

Glyn Moody: What's the nature of the relationship between Fedora and Red Hat?

I’ve come to the realisation that yum and up2date completely and utter suck. Why is it yum has spent the last 20mins downloading rpm headers from the dag repository? Why is it up2date can’t search properly? why does yum return search results in an unreadable way? why do both of them, at the mere hint of something going wrong, spurt out a big python backtrace that is very little use to very many people. Why are these tools SO BAD? How difficult IS THE PROBLEM? Debian have got it right with apt. Headers are downloaded in 30 seconds, search supports regular expressions! There is even an RPM ENABLED version of apt. Why wasn’t this used in Fedora? Why up2date with it’s crappy secretive SSL and XML and SOAP and crapness.