Installing commercial software meant for Ubuntu

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Hi.

I’ve been a happy openSUSE user for quite awhile. Recently, I’ve been interested in installing SideFX’s Houdini and a devkit for the Blackberry Playbook. Both list support for Ubuntu. I’d like to stick with openSUSE, but how do I go about installing something that’s probably packaged via .deb and not .rpm? Most open source software can be found packaged up in both methods, but with these commercial software packages, I’m left with whatever they support.

Has anyone routinely used Alien to convert .deb to .rpm with commercial software packages? What’s your experience with it and what are the gotchas? Will I end up scattering a bunch of files all over the filesystem and not be able to find/remove them?

Thanks!

#2

On 2012-03-14 11:36, linuxvinh wrote:

> Has anyone routinely used Alien to convert .deb to .rpm with commercial
> software packages? What’s your experience with it and what are the
> gotchas?

That they need different versions of libraries, and dependencies are not
handled nicely.

> Will I end up scattering a bunch of files all over the
> filesystem and not be able to find/remove them?

No, if you create an rpm they can be later removed, the list of files is in
the rpm databse.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)