Well, you basically have three ways (that I know of): 1. checkinstall - In my opinion as an amateur packager, it is by far the easiest solution. Maybe others disagree, I'd suggest it for trivial binary packages.
2. a dirty way of doing it, creating your own package using the "ar" command (a .deb package is basically an .ar archive): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar_%28Unix%29 freemind is a java application: * http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/freemind.html * http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/f/freemind/freemind_0.9.0+dfsg-1_all.deb You can find some other packages written in java by tracking down the java maintainers: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-java-maintain...@lists.alioth.debian.org 3. read and find out how to create a package using debhelper and a debian "source" package. I'm not sure if *dh_make* (a command that helps you create a new debian source package from scratch) and debhelper commands will help you with java (I suppose they do :) ), but for a binary source code all you need is to point to the files using the debian/install file. I helped someone once to package binary package (it was a windows binary, it was easier for them to make it work through wine) and make it available to the ubuntu linux community: https://launchpad.net/~ts.sch.gr/+archive/ppa (Note that the program is GPL'ed in case someone is wondering, I forget where the actual source code is though, should be somewhere here: http://alkisg.mysch.gr/ ) dget -ux http://ppa.launchpad.net/ts.sch.gr/ppa/ubuntu/pool/main/g/glossa/glossa_0.9.4.0-2.dsc cd glossa-* ls debian/ As I mentioned previously, the trivial thing to do is to change the debian/changelog, the debian/control and debian/install to match your software and files accordingly. debuild -S -sa ls ../ and voila! You have a debian source package (.dsc, .diff.gz and .orig.tar.gz), which you can build with the help of *pbuilder* (or * pbuilder-dist* in ubuntu) Either way, you need to know the basic structure of either a debian source package or a debian binary package, the new maintainer guide will help you a lot with that: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/ I hope this answer is more acceptable. :)
