Before attempting any installation, the new Fedora 17 user must understand the fundamental incompatibility between package formats. A .deb package is essentially an ar archive containing three specific components: debian-binary (which declares the package format version), control.tar.gz (containing metadata like dependencies, maintainer scripts, and package description), and data.tar.gz (the actual files to be installed, such as binaries, libraries, and configuration files). Fedora’s rpm package format, while serving the same purpose, uses a different internal structure (a cpio archive with its own signature and metadata headers). More importantly, the two systems have different conventions for file system layout, user IDs, script interpreters, and, crucially, . A package built for Debian expects libraries with Debian-specific names (e.g., libssl1.0.0 ), while Fedora might call the same library openssl-libs . Therefore, even if one could extract the files, the resulting system could be unstable or broken due to missing dependencies and conflicting files. For a new user on Fedora 17, simply forcing the installation is strongly discouraged. The correct approach involves a hierarchy of solutions, from best to worst.
: Navigate to your file and run: sudo alien -r your_package.deb . Install the result : sudo yum localinstall your_package.rpm .
ar t yourpackage.deb # list contents of the ar archive ar x yourpackage.deb # extract all three files install deb package on fedora 17 user new
Use alien to convert the package:
Suppose your .deb file is named mysoftware.deb . Run: Before attempting any installation, the new Fedora 17
When you run the converted RPM, rpm might say something like:
alien --to-rpm myprogram.deb
Now you have a directory structure like ./usr/bin/ , ./etc/ , ./usr/lib/ , etc.
Alex opened the terminal. He was greeted by the familiar prompt: [alex@fedora17 ~]$ More importantly, the two systems have different conventions
Note: You will be prompted to type your user password. No characters will show on the screen while you type; this is a standard Linux security feature. Just type it out and hit Enter. 3. Navigate to Your Download Folder
Fedora and Ubuntu (which uses .deb packages) are two completely different Linux distributions. Fedora uses the RPM package format ( .rpm ), while Debian and Ubuntu use the DEB format ( .deb ). Because of this, you cannot double-click a .deb file and install it on Fedora directly.