Here is the deal....

I have a program in RPM format only that I would like to see if I can get it to run on FreeBSD using linux emulation. The installation "seems" to work for the most part except for the default user the program tries to create and install with.

Think of it as though you were installing Apache and it tried to create a user and group which were required by the httpd process to run and install properly. In linux emulation mode this fails because the user and group can not be created via the standard linux commands the RPM is trying to use. Everything else seems to install ok except for this user and group. I tried "pre-creating" the user and group thinking if it did a check first it might be ok. That didn't work.

And no, I can not get a tarball and no this is not nor will ever be ported to BSD. It is Red Hat RPM format only.

Thoughts?

Do you have Midnight Commander available? If so you can go into the rpm with mc and edit the script so it uses the proper commands to create the user. Or like you said create them yourself and then change the script so it uses the existing user.

hmmm never heard of Midnight Commander....off to Google I go...

thanks!