Installing RPM's on non-RedHat systems

Some vendors, like 3dfx, have chosen RPM as their distribution format because many distributions support RPM, or can at least convert RPM to their native package format. Loki uses self-extracting archives (usually with a GUI installer) and compressed tarfiles, but we do not repackage drivers and system conponents.

Installing a package without an installer is not a trivial task. Furthermore, installing a package from a hardware vendor might conflict with the version provided by your distributor (e.g. the XF86_SVGA server from 3dfx conficts with RedHat).

There are several tools available to help you in handling RPM files on systems that do not have that ability.

• The simplest solution is probably to get alien, a program for converting between package formats. Debian uses alien to handle RPM, and you can onvert them to *.deb packages.
• RPM files can also be converted to cpio archives, using e.g. a rpm2cpio.pl perl script (taken from Daryll Strauss' Linux Glide documentation). Use rpm2cpio.pl [whatever.rpm] | cpio -i --create-directories. It is recommended doing this in /tmp/ or some other "sandbox" to check the destinations and then moving the files to an appropriate place.
• You can get RPM from http://www.rpm.org/ and use it for just the driver packages. The site also offers other tools and documentation.