Heresy yes I know, but what about a synaptic deb package installer ext.

[bigpcman]

I know it's heresy to even bring up the subject but I have been wondering if it would be possible to have a synaptic deb package installer extension. This would make available a huge base of software. I was reading about the installer at http://www.tuxsoftware.com/home/get-lsi and it triggered this question.

[florian]

It's quite a challenge to use package interchangeably from one distro to another. The deb format is not the problem (it's seom standard ar archive format and I remember it contains some files to be uncompressed in / in the same way than a tce). However lot of challenges would arise because pre/post install/removal scripts likely would fail in tc, because of mismatched version of libraries, and because you would end up downloading a good part of the base unbuntu/debian in order to meet dependencies.

[bigpcman]

I was afraid that would be the response. So maybe there is a simpler way to greatly expand the application base. I'm not an expert but it seems puppy linux has much in common with tinycore. Is it possible to make a converter extension that converts .pup / .pet files to tce?

[curaga]

Likely they wouldn't work either. Puppy packages are either tarballs or squashfs IIRC, but the cross-distro issues remain.

[jpeters]

I was afraid that would be the response. So maybe there is a simpler way to greatly expand the application base. I'm not an expert but it seems puppy linux has much in common with tinycore. Is it possible to make a converter extension that converts .pup / .pet files to tce?

Puppy base is quite different, as Curaga noted. For example, I gave up on trying to get the puppy version of skype working on tc even after loading all the necessary libs (qt4, etc, etc).  Often the DSL versions are more convertable if all else fails.