Ok, I'm a new Dweebian^WDebian user; and I am wondering how experienced users deal with .rpms and non-.deb'ed software. since the stuff on the debian mirrors is commonly months behind the latest version (or maybe you're testing alpha versions of a project); what do you do if there is a .rpm (or even just a .tgz) for a package you might already have installed with dpkg? do you just install with RPM, or build & install from source; and 1. hope your installation doesn't break something in the Debian arrangement; or 2. that it won't be overwritten by your next apt-get upgrade (since dpkg doesn't know you have this shiny new version in place of the old one). do you convert the .rpm to a .deb with alien; and hope nothing breaks? make a .deb package yourself, taking a lot of time (which others will have to duplicate as well, since you aren't a debian package contributor and have no desire to be one). Here at Real-Time, we build .rpms for everything; especially custom packages. Bob & Nate can build rpms from scratch faster than you'd believe. :) this is not the course I want to follow as a single-workstation home user, however. Carl Soderstrom -- Network Engineer Real-Time Enterprises (952) 943-8700