@nixCraft yeah, pretty much. kind of a shame, i've never managed to wrap my head around the .deb / apt packaging system anywhere nearly as well as i understand RPM.

building a .deb package from source might be easy if you grok it, but i don't, and it looks like greek hieroglyphics to me. even searching for and installing them from the CLI is strange magic. does anyone have a suitable "wrangling .deb packages for dummies" e-book available, like used to exist for RPM?