In reply to:

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Is there a simple way to 'manually' extract stuff from .deb packages (without having full debian installed)?

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A .deb file is an 'ar' archive of two ordinary tar-balls,
one with data and one with control stuff. To extract the
tar-balls do 'ar -x file.deb'. Then use tar, as you would on
any other tar-ball, to dig deeper.

IIRC, there's also a deb-view.el file for emacs that lets
you use emacs to inspect .deb files and I think that the
Norton Commander clone (can't recall the name) handles .debs
too...

/Michael