Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Mon, 8 Aug 2005 RandumAri AT netscape.net wrote:

> I got the package from 
> http://ftp.plusline.de/FreeBSD/ports/alpha/packages-4-stable/Latest/ 
> reinstalled it, and then reinstalled your acm.tgz patch.  It still 
> doesn't work :-/  I get the same "Sorry, I cannot find the file

BSD packages have the same extension as Slackware packages, but they will 
almost certainly not work under Linux. I advise you to not install them. 
To actually get the program you're interested in to work now, you should 
go in and manually delete whatever BSD stuff you've installed. It could 
interfere with the Linux package(s) you actually need. That will be kind 
of tough since BL doesn't have any sort of uninstaller. In general, you 
shouldn't try installing packages under BL as you may have done under Win, 
where you just find an *.exe and download and click it. You need to make 
sure it's the right package for your system or you can foul up something 
badly enough that you'll need to do a reinstall of the OS to correct it. 
Don't expect just any *.tgz to work. It has to be a Slackware package, and 
it has to be compatible with the older libraries BL3 uses. If you can't 
find such a package, you can always ask on this list whether someone's 
willing to compile it for you, whether statically or otherwise. David's 
been very generous about compiling requested packages, and others have had 
a stab at it as well.

Observation for the list: couldn't a script that would work in concert 
with the pkg command be written that would output a list of what was 
installed and where in the form of a text file saved under the name of the 
package? That could be a help in these sorts of situations and could allow 
more clean uninstalls. People could just use the file to go back and 
delete all parts of the package. I think I've heard of such a thing under 
Linux.

James