Novell ZENWORKS LINUX MANAGEMENT 7.2 IR2 - ADMINISTRATION GUIDE 09-25-2008, Administration Manual, Page: 313 / 674

Creating RPM Packages From Tarballs
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Creating RPM Packages From
Tarballs
Novell
®
ZENworks
®
Linux Management uses Red Hat Package Manager (RPM). RPM is a
powerful package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and
updating computer software packages on different devices.
ZENworks Linux Management- Dell Edition supports the RPM format.
RPM Packages are traditionally created using a
.rpm
spec file. This is the native RPM method, and
includes a number of steps, including building the software to be packaged from sources. This
method is the most powerful and flexible because it can exercise all of the options available in RPM.
This section describes the simplest method to create a
.rpm
file. At the same time, it is also the least
flexible.
The following sections contain additional information:
Š
Section 26.1, “Alien Package Converter Overview,” on page 313
Š
Section 26.2, “Installing Alien Package Converter,” on page 313
Š
Section 26.3, “Example Usage,” on page 314
26.1 Alien Package Converter Overview
The Alien package converter is a simple program to convert packages from one format to another
format. However, converting package formats does not usually work very well; package
dependencies and other metadata do not carry over from one distribution to another, much less
across packaging systems.
For our purposes, however, it works nicely. The Alien package converter allows the transformation
from a tarball to a
.rpm
file, which can then be added to a ZENworks Server for distribution.
Additional information and download information about Alien package converter can be found on
the
Alien Package Converter page (http://www.kitenet.net/programs/alien/) .
26.2 Installing Alien Package Converter
1 Ensure that you Perl version 5.004 or later.
2 Download the Alien package converter utility from the Alien Package Converter page (http://
www.kitenet.net/programs/alien/alien_8.53.tar.gz) .
3 Unpack, make, and install the utility using the following commands:
$ tar zxvf alien_8.53.tar.gz
$ cd alien
$ perl Makefile.PL