LinLog

The other day, I mentioned that I had problems installing K3B and KOffice on Xandros. They are not available through the Xandros Network, but can be had from the "unsupported" Debian sources. The Debian packages don't work on Xandros, though I did manage to get both of them installed eventually.

K3B turned out to be the easy one. After surfing around the Xandros forums, I found that somebody had created an APT repository at xandros.or.id, wherever that is. (Is .id India? Or maybe Indonesia?) They had a working package for K3B there, so all I had to do was copy the APT source line
deb http://www.xandros.or.id/archive xxx main
and paste it into the "add" box in Xandros Network configuration, and I was good to go.

KOffice was a bit harder. Once I installed all the proper development packages through XN, building it was simple. Building real KDE packages is always simple - the only hard ones are the half-baked stuff you sometimes find on SourceForge or KDE-Apps. Hell, even building KDE itself is easy - it just takes a really long time. But building it is only half the battle - I also had to make a package for it. Sure, I could always just su to root and do a "make install", but my experience is that this is to be avoided when at all possible. It's acceptable for things like kernel modules, where you'll have to rebuild it when you change kernels anyway, but for desktop software, there's always a good chance that you'll want to remove, reinstall, or upgrade it at a later date, and doing this outside the system package manager is a pain in the neck. Especially uninstalling.

As a result, I find it best to build my own package whenever I install from source. I've been doing it on Slackware for years, and it's extremely easy in most cases. However, I don't have any experience with Debian, so I basically had to start from scratch. After a little searching, I eventually found a decent HOWTO on Debian packaging. Many of the other links I found had lots of stuff on Debian standards and best practices, but since I just want to build packages for my own personal use, I don't really care about those. This guide got me up and running with a quick and dirty Debian package that I can uninstall at will. It wasn't quite as easy as Slackware, but still not too difficult.