by Dwight Johnson
Two recently
announced KDE utilities may be a boon to those who must work
with different package file formats. The release of KPackage 1.1, a
graphical package manager, and KPackViewer 0.36-Beta, a package
viewer and extractor, were announced on December 29, 1998.
KPackage is used mainly to install and uninstall Linux packages
and is a GUI interface to the RPM package manager and the Debian
package manager. It is similar in some ways to Red Hat’s Glint.
KPackage is part of the K Desktop Environment and integrates with
the KDE file manager.
KPackage makes use of the KDE Drag and Drop protocol so that you
can drag and drop packages onto KPackage to open them.
There is a nicely illustrated Web-based
KPackage handbook.
KPackViewer aims to be a useful package viewer on the KDE
desktop. It works with Slackware, RPM (.rpm) and Debian (.deb)
packages and also with Zip (.zip), TarGZip (.tar.gz, .tgz, .tar.Z),
TarBZip2 (.tar.bz2), LHA (.lzh, .lha) and GZIP (.Z, .gz) files.
It is able to display a directory tree view for any of these
formats and allows the user to search for items in the package.
KPackViewer includes some of the functions of Alien, a utility that
converts between the rpm, dpkg, Stampede slp, and Slackware tgz
file formats.
For more information on KPackViewer, visit the KPackViewer
home page.
Utilities like KPackage and KPackViewer open up the processes of
intelligent package management to a much larger group of Linux
users.