I was looking for a new application to use for project management. Amongst people that i spoke to, and e few web resources OpenProj seemed to be quite a must.
OpenProj by Serena Software is a desktop replacement of Microsoft Project. OpenProj has equivalent functionality, a familiar user interface and even opens existing MSProject files. OpenProj is inter operable with Project, with a Gantt Chart and PERT chart
Seems to be pretty handy. On it’s SourceForge page though there’s only a .rpm noarch package.
The RPM packet manager is available for Debian-based systems indeed, non the less there are a few complications.
When attempting to install openproj with rpm:
sid@dev:~/Desktop$ rpm -i openproj-1.4-2.noarch.rpm
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
What’s alien?
Alien allows you to convert LSB, Red Hat, Stampede and Slackware Packages into Debian packages, which can be installed with dpkg.
It can also generate packages of any of the other formats.
This is a tool only suitable for binary packages.
Here goes the installation from the Ubuntu repositories:
sudo apt-get install alien
Afterwards it’s time to convert Openproj from a .rpm package to a .deb one.
sudo alien openproj-1.4-2.noarch.rpm openproj-1.4-2.noarch.deb
Once the package is created, double click on it, to install with the gDebi installer.
Been using it for a few days now, and i must say, i regret not having picked it up earlier.
