On Thursday 31 August 2006 17:57, Jeff Rollin wrote:
On 31/08/06, rich <Rich3800@aol.com> wrote:
I wanted to run Yahoo Messenger on Suse 10.1 but the Yahoo web site provides packages for other distros than Suse. I tried to install Yahoo Messenger anyway, and miracle, it worked. It brings to mind the question of what requirements a package must meet to be able to run on Suse. How can I tell a non-Suse package will be able to run on Suse (10.1) successfully?
I really should have tried to find the link before posting this, but I once read that one user had no trouble installing rpms on Debian if he used the --nodeps option. So to find out if a given package will work, I would just try installing it. In my experience if it will fail, rpm won't let you install it anyhow.
Using '--nodeps' isn't a good idea unless you know exactly what you're doing. It's better to run a trial, first: # rpm -ihv packagename.rpm --test This runs through the installation without actually writing anything into the filesystem. It will report any errors it encounters concerning conflicts and/or missing dependencies. 'man rpm' for more options. You can also 'navigate into' an .rpm file with Konqueror to review which files would be installed, including full paths, so you can check for odd/different ('non-SUSE' standard) locations and/or existing items that would be overwritten. hth & regards, Carl