Quoting ael (adrian.lawrence@???):

> One hopes so. But I had to install the zoom deb package via root.
> Since it is closed source, who knows what the package might do?

I hope you know that 'ar vx $THING.deb' unpacks $THING.deb in place,
without installing it. Doing that gives you text file debian-binary
with a brief package metadata statement, control.tar.gz containing
md5sums and a control directory for building the package, and (last but
not least) data.tar.xz, the tree of files that would be installed on
your system.

Or, if you just want the contents of the deb-enclosed data.tar.xz tree
unpacked into the current directory with less fiddling:

$ dpkg-deb -xv $THING.deb

You might want to grab and sample .deb, put it in /tmp, and experiment,
to see what I'm talking about.

Anyway, root privilege is _not_ needed for such things.

-- 
Cheers,                              Lost my car phone.
Rick Moen                                -- Matt Watson (@biorhythmist)  
rick@???                 
McQ! (4x80)