How to convert (and fixup) the RedHat RPM to run on Debian/Ubuntu

In an earlier post I had shown how I got the Xplat agent running on Ubuntu. I perfected the technique over time, and what follows is a step-by-step process on how to convert and change the RedHat package to run on Debian/Ubuntu. Of course this is still a hack… but some people asked me to detail it a bit more. At the same time, the cross platform team is working to update the the source code on codeplex with extra bits that will make more straightforward to grab it, modify it and re-compile it than it is today. Until then, here is how I got it to work.

I assume you have already copied the right .RPM package off the OpsMgr server’s /AgentManagement directory to the Linux box here. The examples below refer to the 32bit package, but of course the same identical technique would work for the 64bit version.

We start by converting the RPM package to DEB format:

root# alien -k scx-1.0.4-258.rhel.5.x86.rpm --scripts

scx_1.0.4-258_i386.deb generated

Then we need to create a folder where we will extract the content of the package, modify stuff, and repackage it:

root# mkdir scx_1.0.4-258_i386

root# cd scx_1.0.4-258_i386

root# ar -x ../scx_1.0.4-258_i386.deb

root# mkdir debian

root# cd debian

root# mkdir DEBIAN

root# cd DEBIAN

root# cd ../..

root# rm debian-binary

root# mv control.tar.gz debian/DEBIAN/

root# mv data.tar.gz debian/

root# cd debian

root# tar -xvzf data.tar.gz

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