Installing RPM Files On Slackware Based Distributions

RPM is a very famous software package manager in Linux platform. RPM stands for RedHat Package Manager which means it will work well with RedHat based distributions such as Fedora, Mandriva, or SuSE. Is it possible installing RPM (.rpm) files on the other distribution base like Slackware or Debian? Yes, it is very possible. In this tutorial, I will show you how to install XCHM (CHM files viewer for Linux) RPM on Vector Linux (This is the Slackware based distribution). By the way, I used XCHM version 0.9 and it needs at least wxGTK version 2.4. If you use XCHM version 1.0 or above you need wxGTK 2.6 or newer.

1. I assume you have downloaded such files : xchm-0.9.7-1.i586.rpm and chmlib-0.35-1.1.fc2.dag.i386.rpm. You can find them with Google.
2. Login to your console as root.
3. Use rpm2tgz command to convert those RPM files into TGZ (.tgz) files. Slackware use TGZ files as its software package manager. Just type the command rpm2tgz xchm-0.9.7-1.i586.rpm and wait until the conversion process finish. Then convert the second RPM files with the same command rpm2tgz chmlib-0.35-1.1.fc2.dag.i386.rpm and wait until the process finish.
4. Install the chmlib first with command installpkg chmlib-0.35-1.1.fc2.dag.i386.tgz.
5. Then install the xchm with command installpkg xchm-0.9.7-1.i586.tgz.
6. Try to run the application by typing xchm in your console.

You can use RPM command as well in Slackware, but it is strongly recommended if you convert it to TGZ file first, then install it with installpkg command. If you want to remove that program you can use removepkg command followed by your package name or you can use pkgtool program which has an ncurses based interface. Anyway, what if you use the Debian based distribution like Ubuntu? You can use the same steps, but you have to replace the rpm2tgz command with the alien command. That command will produce DEB (.deb) files. And to install them just use apt-get --install command followed by your DEB file name.

The XCHM