I'm thinking about trying to install some software, but I have a couple questions.

The software is proprietary, so no source download. What is available is either a DEB or an RPM file.

The questions.

1- Which, if either, would the better choice to build a TGZ from?

2- How does one figure out what dependencies there may be for such software?

1. Both format can be used to compile and build tgz/txz package in Slackware. You can use a lot of examples in SlackBuilds. For example, you can pick Google Chrome as an example of building from DEB while LibreOffice is an example of building from RPM

2. In most cases, read the documentation. It's mostly included in the website of the application. Or, you can use the simple ./configure (from source) to see if you need an external libraries

The software is draftsight, it is proprietary, so no source code(that I can find anyway) and no documentation that would help in determining dependencies. Since DEB's and RPM's are usually installed through package managers that handle deps automatically, is there a file within them that lists dependencies?

the package is an archive compressed with ar, you can uncompress it inside an empty folder like this
you will find data.tar.gz (that contains all the files of the application -usually it's a .tar.lzma, as in google-chrome-) and some debian files: you are probably interested in the file named "control".

FYI, the tar.gz got inside an opt/dassault-systemes/draftsight/lib folder with pretty much all the needed libraries.
The only thing missing here
was libaudio.so.2 from nas: as I don't need the whole nas stuff just to try draftsight (and being proprietary probably I will delete it in a few mins ), I built nas on slackware-current (I use that), extracted the library (just built and gzipped), copied in /opt/dassault-systemes/draftsight/lib/libaudio.so.2 and linked it in that folder also to libaudio.so.

EDIT: I just waved bye-bye to draftsight

1 members found this post helpful.

First off, thank you for going through the trouble to help.

I was following along up to this point...

I can't find the file libaudio.so to link it to..

you have to build a 32bit version (draftsight is a 32bit application) yourself while creating a package for nas, as I said in the previous post

if you are feeling a little lazy , I got my own upped on my server, you can also download that inside of draftsight lib folder, uncompress it and create a versionless link

If you have an executable file and want to know the dependencies, you can use the "ldd" command.

For example:
That is sometimes helpful to determine the exact versions of libraries need to run a program. In some cases you can get "object" code rather than an executable program. The "object" files are the output of compiling source files. They are normally "linked" along with libraries and kernel entry-point addresses to create the executable program. In some cases you can get partial source, with some object files for the really proprietary parts of the software.

It can be frustrating to deal with companies who claim to support Linux but then don't provide source. They may be many versions behind the latest release of distros that they claim to support.

I didn't catch the fact that it is 32bit. I'm running 64bit, and did not setup multilib, so this could be a problem.

A useful bit of information, I shall try to remember...