Alien binary

Alien binary

Alien binary

l’m running Debian testing/unstable

and I bought a Lexmark Z13 printer ; and am having problems getting it vvorking. İt’s a USB printer so I tried to set it up using a USB guide, but this refused to work (there were no devices listed under /proc/bus/usb/). So I decided to try the Unux drivers that Lexmark indicated on its vvebsite.

I dovvnloaded these and follovved the directions. Running sh Iexmarkz13-1.0-4.sli started the installation procedure. İt listed the printer port as /dev/usb/lpO. Clicking next started the install, but then the following error appeared:

error: cannot open packages index using d&3 – No such file or directory (2) error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm whife executing *exec rpm -i —test SrpmfUename” and the rest of the install fails. I think the problem is that I am not running a RPM-based distribution. Any idea how I can get round this problem?

N/ck Wilson

W H You are C|uite right Debian uses dpkg, fil vvhere as RPM is used on distributions f «1 such as RedHat and Mandrake. If you are able to extract the RPM, you can use the alien program to convert it to a dpkg package, and then install it You can get alien vvith; apt-get install alien

İt is vvorth noting that Debian ‘testing’ and ‘unstable’ are tvvo different distributions of Debian. ‘testing’ is vvhat vvill become Debian 3.0, or Woody, and ‘unstable’ contains unstable packages. If you have both testing and unstable listed in your /etc/apt/sources.list, then it vvill use the packages from unstable as they vvill have higher version numbers, vvhich may be a problem if the packages do not install properly.