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I have a virtual machine that I am trying to use. It doesn't seem to have dpkg or apt-get, so I downloaded the source from http://packages.debian.org/sid/dpkg-dev.

If I run ./configure followed by make I get

$ make
make  all-recursive
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/dbadmin/temp/dpkg-1.16.8'
Making all in lib
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/dbadmin/temp/dpkg-1.16.8/lib'
Making all in compat
make[3]: Entering directory `/home/dbadmin/temp/dpkg-1.16.8/lib/compat'
  CC     empty.o
cc1: error: unrecognized command line option "-Wvla"
make[3]: *** [empty.o] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/dbadmin/temp/dpkg-1.16.8/lib/compat'
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/dbadmin/temp/dpkg-1.16.8/lib'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/dbadmin/temp/dpkg-1.16.8'
make: *** [all] Error 2

I tried $ ./configure --disable-compiler-warnings $ make to get ...

  CC     trigproc.o
  CC     update.o
  CCLD   dpkg
archives.o: In function `tar_writeback_barrier':
/home/dbadmin/temp/dpkg-1.16.8/src/archives.c:1139: undefined reference to `sync_file_range'
archives.o: In function `fd_writeback_init':
/home/dbadmin/temp/dpkg-1.16.8/src/archives.c:77: undefined reference to `sync_file_range'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[2]: *** [dpkg] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/dbadmin/temp/dpkg-1.16.8/src'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/dbadmin/temp/dpkg-1.16.8'
make: *** [all] Error 2

This is my machine

$ uname -a
Linux server.name.domain.tld 2.6.18-194.26.1.el5xen #1 SMP Fri Oct 29 14:30:03 EDT 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

How should I go about getting a functional package manager on this?

Update: $ gcc --version gcc (GCC) 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-51)

highBandWidth
  • 883

3 Answers3

4

Dpkg is designed to work on Debian and Debian-like distributions. It can be difficult to compile on other systems, and you wouldn't be able to use it effectively anyway. Also, a kernel version of 2.6.18 is ancient (I smell CentOS 5), only an older version of dpkg has a chance of working.

gcc --version gcc (GCC) 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-51)

So you have a Red Hat distribution: RHEL or a repackaging thereof such as CentOS. The basic package manipulation tool (the equivalent of dpkg) on Red Hat distributions is rpm. The high-level package manipulation tool (the equivalent of apt-get) is yum.

For more systematic ways of determining which distribution a Linux machine is running, see How to write a script that effectively determines distro name?. If you're lucky, lsb-release -si will give you the answer. Otherwise, look for indicative files such as /etc/*release* or /etc/*version*.

Community
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Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
  • 829,060
2

Do you have all dependencies installed, in particular GCC?

unrecognized command line option "-Wvla" sounds like you don't have GCC, or not a recent enough version.

What system are you running exactly (distribution, version, ...)?

PS: Why do you want to install dpkg on a non-debian / barebones Linux system, and not install Debian?

tricasse
  • 215
  • I have gcc 4.1.2. I gave the uname -a output. How do I get more information on the OS distribution? What package manager should I install on this machine? – highBandWidth Oct 11 '12 at 23:21
1

As it seems that use a Red Hat based system, the default package manager should be rpm and probably yum the corresponding user-frontend.

Please note, that any package you install need to fit to your system and to the other installed packages.

jofel
  • 26,758