I'm thinking of trying Ubuntu as I'm not an expert at linux and I think that it would be a better choice for me than Fedora.

I know that Ubuntu is based on the core of Debian and that it uses deb packages.

But does that mean that any deb package will work even though it say's it's for Debian linux?

Cheers.

Technically most of them will work. Ubuntu does repackage most (if not all) of them and rebrand them as Ubuntu packages. To be honest I don't think many of the Ubuntu packages are at all different from their Debian counterparts.

On an unrelated note, good choice in trying out Ubuntu.

To date, every .deb package I've installed worked with Ubuntu. Even things like Google Earth and Picasa.

I have used softwares even from debian repositories and they seem to be working fine for me in Ubuntu. You can occasionally face an error or two but I don't think it will be a big one, if any. And Ubuntu is a really great distro to start out with.

Don't add a Debian repository to your sources.list--that will lead to breakage.

But you can install individual .deb files from Debian repositories, and it should be fine.

Cheers for the replies. I'm glad that .deb packages should work.

I installed Ubuntu last night on a second harddrive, updated it and installed the nVidia drivers.

Everything seems in order atm.

Most deb packages should install fine using dpkg. An alternative is to enable the "Universe" and "Multiverse" repositories, you can choose from about 18000 packages through the package manager.

In /etc/apt/source.list (see Here for instructions or), Simply uncomment the line corresponding to the universe repository and add the word multiverse at the end. Run "sudo apt-get update", and you should be able to install using apt-get, aptitude or synaptic.

I hope this helps
--Ian

I would assume that would mean adding an Ubuntu repository to an installation of Debian Sarge would cause breakage as well.
My school limits my bandwidth usage per day, and I have debian installed and often it takes too much of my bandwidth to update it. They have an ubuntu repository on campus and I wanted to connect to use that instead.

This thread http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=300048
made me think it might work, and then this thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=357854
made me think maybe it wouldnt work. But I noticed that someone said it is bad to mix the repositories, if I only use ubuntu repositories should it work?

(I downloaded Ubuntu to just use that, and the checksum looked good but the install failed every time I tried, and I can't redownload it until I let me bandwidth usage drop a little, so if I can't get an ubuntu repository working in debian I will try to get Ubuntu again in about a week)