Convert your dpkg, rpm, tgz and slp applications to another package with alien

Xjlittle — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:47:16 +0000

alien is software that allows you to convert an rpm package to dpkg or vice versa. It can also convert a .tgz package to the rpm or dpkg format allowing you to use software that has been packaged for a different package manager on your machine.

The latest version release is 8.72. The author of the software states that even though the version number is high alien should be considered experimental software and should not be used to convert or replace important system packages. That said alien has been in use many years and converted many packages.

The CentOS repositories don’t show an alien package. Apparently this seems to be a debian thing. Never fear though, alien to the rescue before ever installing the package!

First obtain the source package, unpack it and cd into that directory:
wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/alien/alien_8.72.tar.gz tar xzvf alien_8.72.tar.gz cd alien

Don’t install it! We get to have that fun here in a couple of steps. Now get the alien*deb package and download it into the source directory which you just unpacked. Once that is done we’ll convert the deb package to rpm and install it.
wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/alien/alien_8.72_all.deb ./alien.pl -r alien_8.72_all.deb alien-8.72-2.noarch.rpm generated ls Alien alien_8.72_all.deb alien.lsm.in alien.spec debian GPL Makefile.PL README alien-8.72-2.noarch.rpm rpm -ivh alien-8.72-2.noarch.rpm Preparing... ########################################### [100%] 1:alien ########################################### [100%] which alien /usr/bin/alien

There you have it! You now have alien and can convert your favorite rpm packages to deb or deb packages to rpm. Enjoy!

-j

Open Source Software and Linux » convert

Convert your dpkg, rpm, tgz and slp applications to another package with alien