Well I sure am embarrassed.
Still I would install it properly. If installed by the package manager it will be more likely to work flawlessly and be recognized by the package manager. It may be if copied but it may not be.
dpkg is actually the package manager for Debian, apt-get and so forth are front ends that are easier to use.
dpkg will work to install the package.
I believe is the correct command. I rarely use dpkg for installation so am not positive.
This is the tool to use when things are really screwed to straighten out apt-get or aptitude. I am used to using apt-get mainly although aptitude has its great points. Debian recommends apt-get since the release of Squeeze.
Really best to just use one or the other (apt-get or aptitude). One thing that is nice in aptitude is the commands "why" and "why-not". This is to ask about installing a package.
In this case;
would have given you a very good clue as to why it is there. Very handy if trying to slim down an install.
why-not would give you the reasons why a package is not installed or why you can't install it.
You are always better off to install through the CLI rather than a gui. For one thing the gui is just a tool for running the CLI commands. For another it would be a huge package if it did everything the way it can be done in terminal. Most important you do not get the same quality of feedback on possible problems in a gui.
One of the reasons a lot of people still prefer aptitude is that if there is a dependency problem with a package it will give you alternatives that you might use. Kind of time consuming but not as bad as having to rescue your system.
Apt-get doesn't have that feature because it was written after dependency problems using Debian packages pretty much were a thing that didn't happen.
Instead of getting packages from the web, get them from the Debian repos. It is NOT recommended to use Debian testing (Jessie) or Debian unstable (Sid) packages in Debian stable (Wheezy). However this is a better choice than using other packages from some other source.
You do that by simply adding the repos to your sources.list. This can really screw your system and you should study up on pinning and set up your /etc/apt directory to use pinning so that the packages from what ever other repo you are using are the only ones coming from that repo.
One thing you may want to consider is checking to see if Jessie is using the package you want. It is pretty stable. Ubuntu bases their LTS on Debian testing and their other releases on Sid. Debian has a different idea of what stable means than most distros. Non the less it is not stable. You will find that a huge bunch of Debian users on LQ prefer testing or Sid to Debian stable. And argue which is easier. They both are great. My desktop died (see sig for specs) and I am now on an antique laptop running Wheezy. Drives me nuts.
Xfce 4.10 is much nicer than 4.8. Not a lot different but there are improvements. Tabbed file browsing in Thunar is the big one for me.
Jessie may be what you need.
I still haven't looked up the respin you are using but if they are using the Debian repos rather than their own you should be able to upgrade to Jessie.
I would not do that to a working stable install like you already have assuming you can get the libc6 package back. I would dual boot with another copy of the one you are using. Upgrade it to the jessie repo. See what happens.
Configuration of the new install should be easy. Install everything you have on the current one and simply copy the user config files from you home directory (all those hidden files usually expressed as ~./foo files). This will give you the same configuration down to bookmarks, panel settings, wallpaper, terminal configuration.
One thing you could do, for that matter, is to use the live session to resize things so you have room for another install and simply use gparted to copy/paste your current install to another partitionl. Running;
should then pick it right up on your current installs grub and put it on the menu.
When you know it is working you can simply install the package apt-listbugs (which I have on Wheezy too) and make sure wheezy is up to date and upgrade to Jessie.
This may get you the dependencies you need for hamachi.
I know nothing about this package. Never heard of it. It is not in the Debian repo. I would highly recommend checking to see if there is a posibly usable alternative in the Debian repo. There probably is.
It will be different. It will set up differently. If such a package exists, however, it would be easier to learn to use than to have to fix your entire install.
As one of the smart asses here on LQ has in his sig "if it isn't in the repo you don't need it or it doesn't exist." I agree with this completely and so far have found that everything I want or need is in the repo. May be different than what I am used to but it does the same thing.
Living by that is a good way to not have problems.
Another thing is that if you use only packages from the repo for your release you will likely be able to upgrade easily to the next release when it comes out. Packages from other repos will cause you problems just about everytime.
This is why Ubuntu has the package ppa-purge which will wipe out all packages installed from all ppa's and replace the packages with the ones native to the release. Main cause of version upgrade failure in Ubuntu.
You may be like me and prefer a clean install though where this is not a problem. There are times, however, that a version upgrade, particularly in a large finely tuned and configured install that you really don't want to reconfigure.
Of coarse if you install Sid it just keeps going until it breaks. With care it is pretty solid though. If you go to testing and change the repo to read "testing" instead of "jessie" (currently) it will simply upgrade to the next testing when Jessie is released. As there is little or no difference for quite a while this should not be a problem either.
Sorry for the lecture but you sound like an interesting person and I remember before I dropped Windows that 3rd party packages were the norm. If you currently or recently have used that system you should know that this is not a secure thing to do there at all but that you have to.
Under Linux the thing to do is find a distro or release of a distro that supports and supplies the packages you need if at all possible as this is the most stable way to use packages. You are assured that they are well integrated to the system.
Externally supplied packages are, as in Windows, also a security risk. Not nearly as much because someone would notice it in the code. As we know now, however, even open source code can have flaws not seen for a couple of years. Packages maintained by a solid distro like Debian or Red Hat or Slackware or Arch are probably the most safe packages in the computing world.
Use the native repos when ever it is at all possible. Even if you do have to learn something new.
On the other hand what you have going on right now is definitely educational and, as we used to say in ubuntu-testing, FUN.
Just some things to consider. This is Linux. It is your box. It is your OS. It is your choice. And you get to keep the pieces when it breaks.
Have no idea how many I have broken in the last six years. Learned from every one of them. And it was FUN.
I did something dumb, I removed libc6 package and now my system won't boot in DE
) it maybe was because I had an older version already installed so I went back to my package manager and decided to remove the package, only to realize it was a dependency and actually the GNU C library (so essential for like my whole system) when it was already half done!
