(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Well guys, I know several people here were speculating on the idea of apt-get working on Puppy linux, and I bet several more have gotten it working. I just wanted to post my success story on getting it working.

Basically, I went to Debian's website, then to their package section, and then I went on ahead and downloaded apt-get from there. (You have to scroll down to the bottom in order to get compiled downloads per processor type.) Fortunately, puppy supports .deb archives all the way up to the point of installing them and making them accessible from the "start" menu, if applicable, but apt-get is command line only. So open up the terminal, then type apt-get. If you get a reply with available options, then you are pretty much all set! Go ahead and type apt-get update, and it should then update your database of available packages. Now type apt-get -f install, which should go through and download+install any missing or broken dependencies. Finally, if you want some gui management, go ahead and apt-get install synaptic, which should download, install, and place it in the same menu that contains puppy's version of synaptic. (It won't actually launch from there though, you'll have to open a terminal and type synaptic.) I seem to recall having some trouble getting it to work off the bat, so try and improvise from there.

If you have any trouble getting anything to work, or are being prompted with an error message, post it exactly as is here and I will help you.

If you have a problem, go here first to see if it hasn't all ready been posted!

WOOF!!!
nice work yay i can apt-get

No problem

This is actually my first and probably will be my best linux contribution.

Problem...

I'm running puppy 4.6

When I type apt-get I get E: Unable to determine a suitable packaging system type.

flydr2 wrote:Problem...

I'm running puppy 4.6

When I type apt-get I get E: Unable to determine a suitable packaging system type.

not work for me to!!!!

how its work?

if manualy using searching on debian package, it was often doing by me.

Hmmm... I do not remember getting those errors. So I'm assuming you guys both got apt-get from debian's website, and you installed them correctly, right? (And you got the i386 versions?)

A short google search seems to come up saying that sources.list may be a culprit, could both of you please post yours here? (Use PSearch to find it.)

EDIT: After thinking about it for a bit, DPKG generally puts up errors starting with "E:", so go here and download dpkg and install it.

Right....

I am back again... Running Jaunty Puppy version 4.7.6.

As i told you sometime ago the only thing that still keeps me tied to Windows is the videoconferencing in Skype and Yahoo and that fact that get better download speeds in Win without havin` to go Axel -n 100

So thrilled by the prospect of having the power apt-get under my hands i went to this site
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/i386/apt/download and downloaded

apt_0.7.20.2+lenny1_i386.deb installed it nicely no problem





But when i actually tried to install something it it gave me the following error


SO what do we do now? Any ideas...??

Cheers

I have to admit not knowing much about apt-get other than having used it in other distros.

I wonder if it is a repository thing. I don't know how it would be done or checked but do you have the right repositoy?

Also had you done an apt-update?

Probably of no help but might spark other ideas.

John Lewis

You are actually lucky enough to have come across an easy to solve problem

Simple go to /var/lib/dpkg and create a blank file named "status". If it gives you a similar error, repeat, except with the file name requested.

Enjoy, and I will add this to the wiki!

I downloaded and extracted the file with pupzip.

After it failed to work in terminal (err - bash no such command), I read your Debianization instructions and moved the .deb archive to / (not the root directory) and again extracted. No go.

I looked at the list of files supposed to be in the package and can't find them on my system so I don't know what I am doing wrong.

I am running puppy 4.2.1 on a Fujitsu T4220 convertible tablet.

Appreciate any advice/assistance.

Steve

Hmmm... I'm more used to terminal extracting now, so give these a try:
That should then exract everything to the current folder, hopefully you will do this in the root of the hd.

And if that does not work, try searching for apt, and see what you get.

I'm almost betting that it's extracting the binary to a place that is not yet in the path.

After following your instructions for extracting from terminal (in root directory), I see progress.

I now obtained E: msg seen by two other respondents, namely "E: Unable to determine a suitable packaging system type."

I followed your advice and instructions to download and install dpkg. Same error msg.

I realized that you only told me to extract the data.tar.gz and not the control.tar.gz, so I used the same commands in terminal to extract that file as well.

This didn't change the error msg.

Not clear how to analyze this - appreciate comments.
BTW, do I need to RTFM?

Thanks again.

Steve

Since I'm a nicer person I would just say Read the Manual rather than Read The F***ing Manual

But I should probably do the same myself...

After googling around a little more, here is what I can conclude on the error: In some way certain files are missing, since google brings back results from a project called "scratchbox". Unfortunately, none of the issues brought up have solutions, so let's give this a try:

If you could download, manually extract, and install all depend packages found here, that would help me and everyone else out very much. If you could install one, then see if it's working, that would be great as well. (And report which one fixed it, too.) As a side note, you only need to extract the data archive, since the other ones only contain info for dpkg as in how to install the package, etc.

I don't really understand why other users have been getting this, whereas I didn't, has there been a recently release of puppy?

I tried the additional downloads and...

Wow, what a mess that caused!

First, I selected coreutils...deb and lib6...deb to the / directory and then tried extracting manually as before. However, no tar.gz files were generated and so I did two things.

I renamed the files extracted from the previous deb file (the new deb files contained files with the same names). Then, I used the pupzip application with the coreutils....deb and produced a new data.tar.gz file and then in terminal manually ran tar -xvf data.tar.gz.

The screen responded with a string of files.

However, after this the apt-get command did not work any better and then I attempted to recheck the files in / prior to installing the lib6...deb files. The ls command produced and error that involved libselinux.so.1. I had noted that selinux files were in another dependency that I had not downloaded and extracted and installed.

After this, I no longer had an internet connection.

I closed the terminal and reopened it, but it still had the previous messages and problem doing an ls command. With TAB, I found that in theory there were 1601 commands available to the shell (including ls), but the failure to find the libselinux.so.1 file blocked its display.

I rebooted and now could not boot into X, because of a similar error message.

Somewhat desperate, I looked for a backup save file and found one (512 megabytes vs the new one with 3581 megabytes).

I renamed the new save file as bad and moved the backup to the /mnt/home/puppy421 directory and renamed it as pupsave-live421.2fs.

My system now rebooted into an X windowed environment and seems to be normal.

I think I will wait a bit before trying again.

Hope that helps <g>.

Steve

Heh, sorry about your troubles

Hopefully someone else will discover the solution to this, or I'll be able to get working on puppy again.

Apt-Get is not working on my puppy linux plz help

Make sure you extracted it correctly.

tgp1994 wrote:Make sure you extracted it correctly.

What should be extracted. I have extracted nothing

Well, then that poses the question; "What did you do?"

Did you install it by double clicking on the debian package? (
That actually isn't the proper way to do it, you can find some instructions on the first post or the wiki page I created.

Ok, I figured out the answer to the problem of "Cannot detect suitable environment."

The reason the error is coming up is because dpkg is not installed. I will update the wiki page right away.