Deb Files Archive Holds The

Deb Files Archive Holds The

One archive holds the control information and another contains the installable data.

Generally end users dont manage packages directly with dpkg but instead use the APT package management software or other APT front-ends such as aptitude (nCurses) and synaptic (GTK).

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That said, not every Linux distribution is designed to run these packages.

In this article, well be going over a fool-proof way to install a Debian package and make the program work on your Linux distribution.

Take the method shown here and apply it to install a Debian package.

Download the Debian package you want to install and extract it.

In this case, we have the Chrome package, downloaded, and extracted on our system.

Open up a terminal window and use the mkdir command to make a new folder.

All the data we need is in the data.tar.xz archive, but control.tar.gz is also important.

Use ar xv to extract the three items out of google-chrome-stablecurrentamd64.deb.

Items in this folder arent needed, as it is a Debian update job to check for updates.

You might accidentally delete etc, and not the etc folder extracted in deb-extracted.

For example, to install Google Chrome on a non-Debian Linux distribution, youd move the files to where they belong, manually.

The idea is to look at the folder names inside of a data.tar.xz archive, and pay attention to the names.

The folders inside have the same names as folders on your Linux PCs filesystem, and the items inside go to those locations.

Luckily, each Debian package file comes with a set of instructions.

Postinst is short for post installation, a bash script that runs and puts everything where it needs to go.

Inspect the postinst file and pay attention to what the script is doing, especially where its putting files.

This will help you figure out where the items inside data.tar.xz belong, and what they do.

Luckily, each Debian package has a small file in control.tar.gz, outlining a detailed list of important library files the user must install for everything to work.

When the correct programs are on your PC, the extracted program should work like normal.

Using the commands, you can deconstruct just about any of them.

How To Install Deb Files