vmware deb

[Greg Madden]

On Sunday 11 June 2006 02:45, Paul Kaplan wrote:
> On Sunday 11 June 2006 04:11, paul cooke wrote:
> > On Saturday 10 June 2006 19:13, Mario Vukelic wrote:
> > > On Sat, 2006-06-10 at 14:04 -0400, Paul Kaplan wrote:
> > > > I'm using the full version of 5.5.1 workstation
> > >
> > > Does the installation process involve a "make install"? If so, you
> > > should look into the package checkinstall. You'd call it as
> > > "checkinstall make install", and it would record where the files
> > > would be installed, and create a deb that does exactly this.
> >
> > how does that cope when you get a kernel change? cos vmWare basically
> > has to be "reinstalled" whenever you change the kernel. A deb would
> > just be a pre-compiled form of vmware and you would have to go to the
> > trouble of making a fresh deb and installing it when there's a kernel
> > upgrade.
> >
> > That's fine when you're a sys-admin responsible for several
> > installations and you're running a local repository for all your
> > installations to upgrade against, but for the average home or SoHo
> > user, it's too much hassle... it's far easier to just run the vmware
> > script that it asks you to run after any updates that break it.
>
> I think it's always easier to have a package.  In any case, once vmware
> is installed on your system, you don't have to reinstall it to handle
> kernel upgrades.  You do have to reconfigure however, since vmware
> installs modules. Using a deb wouldn't eliminate this need.  I'm
> willing to bet that using a tar.gz would be the same, it's just that
> using a deb makes in cleaner and faster to remove if you should so
> choose.
> P

I agree, .deb, packages are nice to work with... but in the case of Vmware 
I do like the *.tar.gz file. Maybe because I like to install it 
to /usr/local, with a symlink to /usr/local/bin. There is also an 
un-install script in the same dir as the configure script.
-- 
Greg Madden