Installing .rpm or .deb on gentoo

[LiKao]

Hi,

I am currently looking for a way to install *.rpm or *.deb files on Gentoo. However all posts I seem to be able to find on that topic just say that I should use a native gentoo package for that purpose and that there is no way to do what I want.

However I am currently trying to install my printer, which I have been using under ubuntu for quite some time, in a new Gentoo box. The printer is a Epson BX620 FWD network printer, and there are drivers for linux directly available from Epson. However Epson only provides these drivers as .deb or .rpm for direct installation in the system. Hence I need a way to get to the content of these files and somehow install it in my system.

Is there any way to achieve this?

Aparently there is a gutenprint driver for the BX 620 FWD (at least this is what I am currently using in Ubuntu), but it would be nice to be able to install the most up to date driver version from Epson itself. Also there does not seem to be any other way to use the network scanner under linux except using these drivers.

Thanks for your help.

[Jaglover]

You can use app-arch/rpm2targz or app-arch/deb2targz to convert packages, then just extract them into a tmp location and copy over what's needed by hand. Keep a log of what you do, just in case you need to remove drivers.
_________________
Please learn how to denote units correctly!

[Yuu]

Hi LiKao,

you can also use "ar", from the package sys-devel/binutils :

[Ant P.]

You can also use Paludis, which is as simple as running a command in the unpacked rpm/deb directory and will let you uninstall it cleanly like any other package.

[toralf]

You might use the "rpm" command + the parameters to ignore both dependencies and install scripts.
In that case you should inspect the installed libs/programs with "ldd" or "lddtree" to see, whether there are additional libs to be installed.

[biodothack]

have you fun withit, have you tried looking for the ppd file for your mode as this is how I got my hp working,
_________________
big brother is watching, are you ready?

[phunehehe]

According to http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/tech/deb/ , which seems like the home page of dev2targz:

[Mgiese]

used the ar command for the .dev file, but i received 2 files .. ?!?
_________________
I do not have a Superman complex, for I am God not Superman

[cb88]

you can extract those files with

tar xvf file.tar.gz

They are just plain tar.gz files and the control.tar.gz contains md5sum etc.. and the data.tar.gz contains the acutal packaged binaries