Hi, I'm going to try installing Debian from a Knoppix CD any day now. I've been looking at the Debian package tree, and was pleasantly surprised by the incredibly small size of the packages. For example, Wine debs are <1 MB, whereas a Wine RPM is >6 MB. Blender debs are ~2 MB, and RPMs are normally 10 MB. Am I not understanding something? Will I need to download a million other dependancies (even if automated by apt) in order to get the packages to work? I have extremely slow dialup, so small packages are a thing of beauty in my mind. Thanks for the help!

RPMs have makefiles and config files so i think thats the differance debians apt-get takes
care of dependancies for you like if you wanted emacs 2.xx thats all you would
have to type in it would find all that goes with it unlike rpms where you first need this or that
before you can install
i hope ive been helpful

they both need depencies in order to install the only diffrence is apt resolves these depencies before install and installs them wehere rpm just warns you and do not install anything you have to install them by hand they thing about linux is all the things install on each other thats why you have depencies and packages became smaller cause they use other packages....