Flashes of Panic

It looks like I need to break down a package.

I’m still working on this system monitoring problem. I’ve found the relevant package to expose the system diagnostics to Linux (Dell calls it OpenManage, to match a similar package for Windows,) and I’ve found a guy who reverse-engineered the package for Debian. This tells me a lot about the structure of the package, but unfortunately, not much about whether it will work with Gentoo.

For those who aren’t deeply involved with Linux, I’ve established that a particular recipe written for apples can also be made to work with bananas, but I’m not quite sure what that tells me about the oranges I have.

The problem (so far) lies in the way the Linux distribution people market their various distributions. I know that the fundamental source and structure of the Linux kernel is the same for all of them; I know that they sometimes differ in the way they manage software packages (rpm vs. deb vs. emerge vs. what-all else) and which packages they ship with (or don’t ship, as the case may be.) I know there are sometimes some file-system differences, e.g. where configuration scripts are found.

What I can’t find, so far, is documentation of just what those differences are. In fact, so far with Gentoo, all I’ve been able to find out about the kernel is that it’s very, very customizable… which means I could find someone else who has made this package work on their Gentoo system, then do the same things and have it not work on the one I’m dealing with. Gentoo is very high on their “emerge” package system, and how it’s “more perfect” than other package managers, but that doesn’t tell me a whole lot about how it actually works and what I need to do to work with it.

It seems like I may have to deconstruct this package after all, and take it apart the long way. Maybe I can learn something someone else can use.