My first DEB
My first DEB
We are required to use a project management tool for our IT senior students. Our options have ranged from elaborate spreadsheets to a clumbersome MS Project that can only be used at school. GanttProject started a flurry of interest amongst Victorian IT teachers. It is easy to use FOSS that is free for students to take home to play around with.
Last night I created my first ever DEB package for GanttProject from an RPM software package and successfully installed then tested it on a Linux system running Ubuntu 6.10 - Edgy Eft. It was very easy to make the conversion from the RPM package hosted on Merlinux using Alien that I installed from the normal Debian repositories.
An advantage of distributing a software package this way is that it can be included in the Debian Synaptic Package managerthat comes built into the Ubuntu distribution. Non-technical users can then easily find, read about, install, automatically upgrade and cleanly remove the software with just a click of the mouse.
I hope that the authors take up my suggestion that they add a DEB version of their software package to the synaptic management repositories, joining other software packages such as Thunderbird, Firefox, Moodle, OpenOffice etc.