Hi All, today I experienced an weird functioning of rpm on ubuntu. In general, to install any software on ubuntu we use "apt-get" command,but, the problem with it is that it will install the latest version of that sofware present in the repository. For installing the older versions of the particular software, "apt-get" is not useful. Today I wanted to install the java 1.4 version on my box. I downloaded the rpm.bin file from the oracle Sun site. let us assume that the name of the downloaded file is java1.4.rpm.bin . To convert the file into an rpm format I gave the following command

./java1.4.rpm.bin

This command showed a list of terms and conditions and after accepting, it generated the rpm file java1.4.rpm. Then I gave the command

rpm -ivh java1.4.rpm
After executing this command, I expected java to be installed but it gave me an error like "rpm: please use alien to install rpm packages on Debian, if you are really sure use --force-debian switch. See README.Debian for more details."


When I do the following steps same-to-same on redhat and when I gave the command
./java1.4.rpm.bin, java got installed automatically and environmental variable was created. I do not know why ubuntu is not supporting the rpm packages. If we want to use "apt-get" then we have to see the alternative way of installing the older versions of any software.

It shouldn't be surprising that it worked on redhat, as RPM originally stood for "Redhat Package Manager". Debian uses .deb style packages. There is a utility called alien that can install .rpm packages. Use apt-get to install alien, and use alien to install the .rpm on your Debian system. Or compile it from source. Best bet: see if the oracle Sun site has a .deb package available for download.

RPM is "Redhat Package Management" I believe and is only natively supported in Linux OSs based on Redhat such as Mandriva, Suse, Fedora, etc. Ubuntu is based on Debian which natively uses .deb files. To install the rpm on your system do the following.

1) Install alien
2) Install the rpm with alien
If it doesn't work try downloading the version that is not in rpm format and just stick it in a folder of your choosing and put symbolic links to everything in the bin folder after it's been extracted in a folder that's in your $PATH.