myDSL Extensions (deprecated) :: Tar conversion



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How does this help us? I too want to change these to make them into DSL extensions. There are some programs which are small and useful. One is fluxconf a program to change the keybindings and menus in Fluxbox. Then there is a program called wmsetbg which is useful to set a background to fluxbox.

There does not seem to be a way to do this in DSL.

Am I wrong?

Most applications in *.tar format are not compiled, but merely archives containing source code.
If the archive you've downloaded is a source tarball, you can't directly convert it to a DSL extension.  The source first needs to be successfully compiled into an executable application, and then it can be put into an extension, including any dependencies which aren't present in DSL.
Straight conversion to a DSL extension can be accomplished only by using precompiled binaries such as applications in *.deb format.
This is correct.

There are few applications that are distributed in *.tar.gz archives that are in binary format.  The most common ones are slackware packages.

Usually, a tar archive of precompiled binaries will mention the computer architecture that the program is compiled for.  For example:  *.i386.tar.gz could contain a precompiled program that is compiled to run on an Intel 386 processor architecture (also includes, 486, Pentium, Celeron, Athlon, Duron, etc).

Also, a good hint is to see if the archive contains files that are placed in a "bin" directory like /bin or /usr/bin

You can tell this by typing:

tar -ztvf filename.tar.gz | more

and it will display the list of files that are contained in the archive.

Good Luck.
Another exception is Slackware packages (usually with a .tgz extension), which are very similar to DSL packages...the main difference is Slack packages include a script used to copy the files and possibly run ldconfig afterward (or at least that's what I recall...it's been a while since I've used Slackware).

You could probably just do 'sudo mkwriteable' to open up the additional directories without needing to install a dsl, but I can't say from experience.

original here.