I am pretty new to Knoppix/KnoppMyth but have been using RedHat for several years.

I am trying to install several RPMs (namely rzsz which helps me xfer files). I am not sure how RPMs are installed on Knoppix (which is a variant of Debian?)

Anyway, here's what I did.

1. rpm didn't seem to be installed, so I ran:

apt-get install rpm

2. This seemed to install RPM (4.0.4-25).

3. When I attempted run rpm as I normally would on my RedHat system to unpack rzsz like this:

rpm -ivh rzsz-0.12.20-635.i586.rpm

I received the following error (in quotes):

"rpm: To install rpm packages on Debian systems, use alien. See README.Debian.
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - No such file or directory (2)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm"

I am not sure what any of this means. Is alien a command or a parameter of some sort?

Thanks for any info,

Answering my own question here, maybe others will benefit from it in the future.

I simply ran:

apt-get install alien

Which installed alien that allowed me to install my rpms like so:

alien -i <rpm-name>

Answering my own question here, maybe others will benefit from it in the future.

I simply ran:

apt-get install alien

Which installed alien that allowed me to install my rpms like so:

alien -i <rpm-name>

yes in order to install rpm's in any debian based system you have to use alien, but the best solution is to find a .deb of the package. There are some packages that do not have them, but you would be supprised how many are already in the debian archive if you just try.

for example lrzsz is in debian unstable branch and I believe it is what you were looking for.