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Sense Hofstede
Asked: 2010-08-29 06:37:24 +0800 CST

Can you get a Source RPM to build as a DEB?

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The manufacturer of our printer (Canon) does provide Linux printer drivers for most its printers. However, they are all 32bit and only the newer printer drivers are available in both DEB and RPM. The older are only provided as RPM files.

I use 'alien' to convert the RPM files to the DEB format so I can install the drivers. However, lately it seemed Canon has screwed the new drivers for the Canon PIXMA iP3300 up a bit in the build process of the RPMs.

Although all printer-specific RPM packages are available, the cnijfilter-common package, containing the vital CUPS filter, is distributed as a Source RPM (*.src.rpm). Very useful to build your own drivers if you want to ('rpmbuild --rebuild cnijfilter-common-2.70-2.src.rpm'), but not so much when you run a Debian-based operating system.

My question is: is it easy to convert a Source RPM to something you can easily build as a DEB, or will I have to manually convert the Source RPM to something usable?

drivers packaging printing rpm

6 Answers

  1. Fundamentally no - because of the way RPM and DEB packages go about managing packages building a DEB straight from src.rpm isn't likely.

    You can still build RPMs with Ubuntu using the rpm pacakge (sudo apt-get install rpm) Once that's intalled you can run rpmbuild on the rpm src as you would on a RH system. Then continue with your conversion to DEB via Alien or however else you would.

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  2. Best Answer

    Yes, you can. Sort of. Unpack the rpm with rpm2cpio and cpio, unpack the sources, create a debian/ dir inside and use the contents of the .spec file to create debian/control, debian/changelog, debian/rules, debian/copyright. Some packaging knowledge is definitely required for that last step though.

    Then again, if all you want is the sourcefilter, maco's advise will get you there much quicker :)

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  3. No you can't. But if you have the source RPM, that means you have the source code, so you can package it as a DEB anyway, which is good news!

    The simplest way to make a quick DEB package is to use checkinstall.

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  4. Extract the contents of the RPM with cpio then you can grab the CUPS filter out of it and paste it wherever in the filesystem it goes.

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  5. This answer on Launchpad indicates that someone got your printer working by selecting the Canon bjc-7000 driver.

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  6. You can (most of the time) u need to use a program called Alien (sudo apt-get install alien) This program converts RPM to DEB. HowtoForge Tutorial

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