Debian GNU/Linux includes complete source-code for all of the included
programs, so it should work on all systems which are supported by the Linux
kernel; see the Linux
FAQ
for details.
The current Debian GNU/Linux release, 3.0, contains a complete, binary distribution for the following architectures:
i386: this covers PCs based on Intel and compatible processors, including Intel's 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II (both Klamath and Celeron), and Pentium III, and most compatible processors by AMD, Cyrix and others.
m68k: this covers Amigas and ATARIs having a Motorola 680x0 processor for x>=2; with MMU.
alpha: Compaq/Digital's Alpha systems.
sparc: this covers Sun's SPARC and most UltraSPARC systems.
powerpc: this covers some IBM/Motorola PowerPC machines, including CHRP, PowerMac and PReP machines.
arm: ARM and StrongARM machines.
mips: SGI's big-endian MIPS systems, Indy and Indigo2; mipsel: little-endian MIPS machines, Digital DECstations.
hppa: Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC machines (712, C3000, L2000, A500).
ia64: Intel IA-64 ("Itanium") computers.
s390: IBM S/390 mainframe systems.
The development of binary distributions of Debian for Sparc64 (UltraSPARC native) architectures is currently underway.
For further information on booting, partitioning your drive, enabling PCMCIA
(PC Card) devices and similar issues please follow the instructions given in
the Installation Manual, which is available from our WWW site at http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual
.
Debian developers communicate with other Linux distribution creators in an effort to maintain binary compatibility across Linux distributions. Most commercial Linux products run as well under Debian as they do on the system upon which they were built.
Debian GNU/Linux adheres to the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy
Standard
. However, there is room for interpretation in some of the
rules within this standard, so there may be slight differences between a Debian
system and other Linux systems.
For most applications Linux source code is compatible with other Unix systems. It supports almost everything that is available in System V Unix systems and the free and commercial BSD-derived systems. However in the Unix business such claim has nearly no value because there is no way to prove it. In the software development area complete compatibility is required instead of compatibility in "about most" cases. So years ago the need for standards arose, and nowadays POSIX.1 (IEEE Standard 1003.1-1990) is one of the major standards for source code compatibility in Unix-like operating systems.
Linux is intended to adhere to POSIX.1, but the POSIX standards cost real money and the POSIX.1 (and FIPS 151-2) certification is quite expensive; this made it more difficult for the Linux developers to work on complete POSIX conformance. The certification costs make it unlikely that Debian will get an official conformance certification even if it completely passed the validation suite. (The validation suite is now freely available, so it is expected that more people will work on POSIX.1 issues.)
Unifix GmbH (Braunschweig, Germany) developed a Linux system that has been certified to conform to FIPS 151-2 (a superset of POSIX.1). This technology was available in Unifix' own distribution called Unifix Linux 2.0 and in Lasermoon's Linux-FT.
Different Linux distributions use different package formats and different package management programs.
Alien
package
is used to convert between different package formats.
Do you actually still have such a program? :-)
To execute a program whose binary is in a.out (i.e., QMAGIC or ZMAGIC) format,
If your kernel supports a.out binaries by a module, then be sure that the binfmt_aout module is loaded. You can do this at boot time by entering the line binfmt_aout into the file /etc/modules. You can do it from the command line by executing the command insmod DIRNAME/binfmt_aout.o where DIRNAME is the name of the directory where the modules that have been built for the version of the kernel now running are stored. On a system with the 2.2.17 version of the kernel, DIRNAME is likely to be /lib/modules/2.2.17/fs/.
libc4
, found in one of the releases prior to
release 2.0 (because at that time we removed the package). You might want to
look for an old Debian CD-ROM (Debian 1.3.1 still had this package), or see
ftp://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/
on the Internet.
xcompat
package (see above for availability).
If you have a commercial application in a.out format, now would be a good time to ask them to send you an ELF upgrade.
Yes. Just install the required libc5
libraries, from the
oldlibs section (containing old packages included for
compatibility with older applications).
Yes. Install libc5-altdev
and altgcc
packages (from
the oldlibs section). You can find the appropriate libc5-compiled
gcc
and g++
in directory
/usr/i486-linuxlibc1/bin. Put them in your $PATH variable to get
make
and other programs to execute these first.
If you need to compile libc5 X clients, install xlib6
and
xlib6-altdev
packages.
Be aware that libc5 environment isn't fully supported by our other packages anymore.
Files under the directory /usr/local/ are not under the control of the Debian package management system. Therefore, it is good practice to place the source code for your program in /usr/local/src/. For example, you might extract the files for a package named "foo.tar" into the directory /usr/local/src/foo. After you compile them, place the binaries in /usr/local/bin/, the libraries in /usr/local/lib/, and the configuration files in /usr/local/etc/.
If your programs and/or files really must be placed in some other directory, you could still store them in /usr/local/, and build the appropriate symbolic links from the required location to its location in /usr/local/, e.g., you could make the link
ln -s /usr/local/bin/foo /usr/bin/foo
In any case, if you obtain a package whose copyright allows redistribution, you should consider making a Debian package of it, and uploading it for the Debian system. Guidelines for becoming a package developer are included in the Debian Policy manual (see What other documentation exists on and for a Debian system?, Section 11.1).
This error message could mean that the program is linked against the
libc5 version of the X11 libraries. In this case you need to
install the xlib6
package, from the oldlibs section.
You may get similar error messages referring to libXpm.so.4 file, in which case
you need to install the libc5 version of the XPM library, from the
xpm4.7
package, also in the oldlibs section.
Debian uses the terminfo database and the ncurses library of terminal interface routes, rather than the termcap database and the termcap library. Users who are compiling programs that require some knowledge of the terminal interface should replace references to libtermcap with references to libncurses.
To support binaries that have already been linked with the termcap
library, and for which you do not have the source, Debian provides a package
called termcap-compat
. This provides both
libtermcap.so.2 and /etc/termcap. Install this
package if the program fails to run with the error message "can't load
library 'libtermcap.so.2'", or complains about a missing
/etc/termcap file.
AccelX uses the termcap library for installation. See Why can't I compile programs that require libtermcap?, Section 3.10 above.
You need to install the motifnls
package, which provides the
XFree-2.1 configuration files needed to allow Motif applications compiled under
XFree-2.1 to run under XFree-3.1.
Without these files, some Motif applications compiled on other machines (such as Netscape) may crash when attempting to copy or paste from or to a text field, and may also exhibit other problems.
The Debian GNU/Linux FAQ
version 3.0.2, 28 January 2003