Today I’ll be telling you about an interesting way to build your Debian packages using Deb-o-Matic, a tool developed and maintained by Luca Falavigna. Some more details about this tool from the package’s description:

From now on, the Debian Package Tracking System (PTS) will produce, alongside HTML pages meant for humans, RDF pages meant for Linked Data / Semantic Web aware applications.

Most Debian source packages are using the “3.0 (quilt)” format. This means that Debian changes to upstream files are managed in a quilt patch series. Knowledge of quilt is thus a must if you want to get involved in some serious packaging work. Don’t worry, this tutorial will teach you how to use quilt in [...]

So, I (an RPM packager) have taken it on – APT packages. A Linux distribution I’m not all too familiar with, a packaging mechanism I’m not all too familiar with, and guidelines and processes and rules I’m completely unaware of.

Adding a PPA channel to your system is stupidly simple, but once you’ve done it and you’re not properly versed in Debian package management, you may have destroyed your system. I got this software from a PPA channel just so that I could try out the experimental Blu-Ray support. Little did I know (well, actually, [...]

This is one of those things that doesn’t get explained much, because it’s almost too simple to document: it’s often useful to keep a few Debian package files (.deb files, used in Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux distributions derived from them) available for installation, either on your local host or on other computers on the same [...]

After not attending FOSDEM for a few years, this year I decided to attend and also give a talk about “Debian packaging for beginners”, a replay of a talk given by Gergely Nagy in Debconf11. As the per distribution devrooms were replaced a few years ago with the cross-distributions rooms, I thought it might be [...]

Continuing on with this project it became necessary to look a little deeper on how apt based software repositories handle version numbers. At first I thought this was the silliest overly complicated mess I could imaging.

The following is a short tutorial on how to create a Debian meta package. Just as a brief background for those that do not know what a meta package is – a meta package is a Debian package that simply tells the package manager to download a whole bunch of other packages.

If you’ve ever thought “there should be a command that does X” for Linux, there probably is. Finding it, however, is not always easy. This is especially true when managing packages on Debian-based systems.

Are you enthusiastic about Debian and thinking about contributing? We want to guide you in the basics.

This article describes a simple way on how to create a home made debian package and include it into a local package repository. Although we could use a existing Debian/Ubuntu package, we will start from scratch by creating our own minimalistic unofficial debian package.

Now that Squeeze is out, a lot of cleanup is going in Debian packages. One of them is getting rid of unnecessary dependencies with minimal versions in packages. I.e. getting rid if unnecessary versions like perl (>= 5.8.1).

One of the common complains about Debian packaging is that it’s hard to learn because, while there is quite a lot of high-quality documentation, it is often written more as a reference manual than as a tutorial: it’s great if you already know everything and want to check some detail, but not so great if [...]

If you have a dedicated server that runs Debian GNU/Linux or a derivative distribution, such as Ubuntu Server Edition, you should be familiar with apt-get. This is the command you normally use to install, uninstall, and update software packages.

In the last years, I have seen many people try to use dpkg –build to create Debian packages. Indeed, if you look up dpkg’s and dpkg-deb‘s manual pages, this option seems to be what you have to use…

You’re probably manipulating Debian packages everyday, but do you know what those files are? This article will show you their bowels… Surely they are more than file archives otherwise we would just use TAR archives (you know those files ending with .tar.gz). Let’s have a look!

While I have spent countless hours working on the new source format known as “3.0 (quilt)”, I’ve just realized that I have never blogged about its features and the reasons that lead me to work on it. Let’s fix this.

What if one has an Intel Pentium-based processor and the other has an AMD64? In that case what you need is some way to replicate the package selection but use the appropriate ones for the new architecture. Enter dpkg.

The package management system on Linux makes installing and upgrading software a snap, but it also caches every package in a local folder in case it’s needed again. Here’s how to clear that cache and save loads of drive space.

Since the introduction of the “3.0 (quilt)” source format, it is now possible to integrate multiple upstream tarballs in Debian source packages. This article will show you how to do the same with your own package shall you need it.

Question: I would like to know how to install, uninstall, verify deb packages on Debian. Can you explain me with an example? Answer: Use dpkg to install and remove a deb package as explained below.

The New Maintainer’s guide does assume you have an existing tarball to work from, and that is often not the case if you just want to package up something you have made so I thought I would write a detailed walkthrough of packaging up something simple.

Because we each modify the vm to fit in our specific environment, the need to enforce the existence of *packages* and not specific *configuration* is paramount – this turned out to be a godsend for us.

This howto only gives you brief steps to build a Debian package for your program. It is not a great tutorial, but it will help me to remember the steps I have to do when I want to build DeTraS and I hope it will help you in the process of building a package

How do I view the contents of a .deb file under Debian / Ubuntu Linux? You need to install the apt-file command which is a command line tool for searching files in packages for the APT package management system.

Learn how to install, upgrade, and manage packages on your Linux® system. This article focuses on the Advanced Packaging Tool, or APT, which is the package management system used by Debian and distributions derived from Debian, such as Ubuntu.

Most software packages for Linux are distributed in one of two special file formats: Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) files or Debian (DEB) files. While the previous month focused on working with RPM files, this one spotlights the format and tools used with DEB files.

This method here worked for a few years and I expect it to work for the next few years, too. The trick is to get one unstable package and its dependencies compiled on your stable Debian installation.

Apt is a great tool as long as you aren’t building packages from source (and not making debs out of them). I have packaged a whole bunch of debs, but sometimes it just isn’t necessary.