How to create deb installer from tarballs?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Simplest Debian Packaging Guide?

There are several tarballs (e.g. Firefox, Eclipse, Zend Studio and ...) that have executable files in them, that we can extract and run. but this executable will be available only for the user that extracts it.

If we want to make it available for all users we should move it to some location like /usr/share, /usr/local/share/, /opt/, ... and give appropriate permissions, make an executable file in /usr/bin/ and so on...

I want to make a deb installer file that does them all!
How to do it?

Solution 1

Ubuntu wiki links:

• The packaging guide
• Information on getting a package integrated into Ubuntu
• Other developer resources

If it's a source, compile the source and then look into checkinstall. It makes deb packages from compiled source code.

checkinstall

A guide for using checkinstall

Also you can try the following,

To get a deb from a tar.gz install alien

sudo apt-get install alien

then go to the tar.gz folder and:

alien -k filename.tar.gz

then double click on the new deb file to install it. (gdebi needs to be installed)

Solution 2

The best way to do this with open-source applications is to run sudo make checkinstall instead of sudo make install. There are several programs that provide a gui for this process (creating packages) but they can be tricky to use if you do not know what you are doing.

One thing though, you do realize that you can install these applications (including newer versions) without using those tarballs?