advice getting jre installed

[Larry Beckley]

Hi Noah,

Keeping in mind that you did ask for advice, I'll ask for a favor -- please
take this with a grain of salt.

In my use of first Debian, and later Ubuntu, I have developed certain habits
that have held me in good stead. For one, I personally prefer to use the
apt/
dpkg tool set as much as possible. Therefore, rather than using the rpm
utility to install rpm'd packages, I generally use alien to convert .rpm
files
to .deb, so that I can use dpkg to do the actual installation. In
general whenever installing, I always do 'simulation' runs first to get
a handle on any
potential problems that may arise.

dpkg --simulate -i deb_package_filename.deb # or
apt-get -s install deb_package_name

As far as determining installed versions of packages, I find

dpkg -s package_name

to be an excellent method for determining the actual package version, which
is frequently at least slightly different from that claimed by the installed
application itself. This command will provide full dependency information as
well.

I think the apparent discrepancy you referred to in relation to gawk is
actually
just a small lack of clarity on rpm's part. I may be wrong about this, but I
think when rpm identifies a version problem with any dependent package, it
reports all know dependencies and their minimum versions, rather than
reporting only the guilty party, leaving it up to the tech savvy user to
fill in the
blanks as it were. If I am off base in this assumption, I'm sure someone out
there will correct me.

My general recommendation is that you try using 'dpkg -s' against each
pakage
name that rpm reported in its list of dependencies/minimum versions. You
should find at least one that is 'sub-minimum.' If not, you might
consider using
'good-ole' apt-get to install alien so as to convert the .rpm to .deb,
for dpkg
installation. I suggest this as it might be possible that some
discrepancies exist
between rpm and apt/dpkg in terms of what is currently installed.


Best of luck,

LarryB

Noah wrote:

>Hi there,
>
>I am having a little difficulty getting the jre rpm installed. I am
unable to
>figure out the proper dependencies to retrieve and install with
apt-get. some
>of the dependencies are in fact installed but still rpm complains about
them
>not being installed. like gawk is in fact installed. I dont know what
>apt-get shoudl retrieve to intall the proper dependencies for sh-utils,
>fileutils, testutils, and glibc. so somebody please help me with the next
>steps of getting jre installed.
>
>--- output ---
>
># rpm -ivh jre-1_5_0_07-linux-i586.rpm
>error: Failed dependencies:
> glibc >= 2.1.2-11 is needed by jre-1.5.0_07-fcs.i586
> sh-utils >= 2.0-1 is needed by jre-1.5.0_07-fcs.i586
> fileutils >= 4.0-8 is needed by jre-1.5.0_07-fcs.i586
> gawk >= 3.0.4-1 is needed by jre-1.5.0_07-fcs.i586
> textutils >= 2.0-2 is needed by jre-1.5.0_07-fcs.i586
> /bin/sh is needed by jre-1.5.0_07-fcs.i586
># !gawk
>gawk --version
>GNU Awk 3.1.5
>Copyright (C) 1989, 1991-2005 Free Software Foundation.
>
>This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
>it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
>the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
>(at your option) any later version.
>
>This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
>but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
>MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
>GNU General Public License for more details.
>
>You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
>along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
>Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
02110-1301, USA.>
>-- snip ---
>
>
>thanks in advance,
>
>Noah