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The Alien package converter:
Alien is a program that converts between the rpm, dpkg, stampede slp and
slackware tgz file formats. If you want to use a package from another
distribution than the one you have installed on your system, you can
use alien to convert it to your preferred package format and install
it.
Warning, alien can be dangerous:
Despite the high version number, alien is still (and will probably
always be) rather experimental software. It's been under development
for over a year now, but there are still many bugs and limitations.
Alien should not be used to replace important system packages, like
sysvinit, libc, or other things that are essential for the functioning
of your system. Many of these packages are set up differently by the
different distributions, and packages from the different distributions
cannot be used interchangeably. In general, if you can't uninstall the
package without breaking your system, don't try to replace it with an
alien version.
Getting alien:
The newest versions of alien are available at the alien home page;
drop by http://kitenet.net/programs/alien/
On sunsite and its mirrors, alien is located in the
pub/Linux/utils/scripts/ directory.
You can also get rpm or deb packages of alien:
deb: ftp://master.debian.org/debian/unstable/binary-all/admin/alien_*.deb
rpm: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/contrib/noarch/alien-*.rpm
Other things you'll need:
To use alien, you will need several other programs. Alien is a perl
program, and requires perl version 5 or greater.
To convert packages to or from rpms, you need the Red Hat Package
Manager; get it from Red Hat's ftp site.
If you want to convert packages into debian packages, you will need
the dpkg, dpkg-dev, and debhelper packages, which are available on the
Debian ftp site.
To convert to/from stampede packages, you will need bzip2, get it at
http://www.muraroa.demon.co.uk/
Attention, Slackware, Red Hat, and Stampede users: Bruce S. Babcock
<babcock@math.psu.edu> has put together an "alien-extra"
package of all the extra files you need to use alien on
a Red Hat or Slackware system.
The Slackware version is at
ftp://kitenet.net/pub/code/alien/extra/alien-extra-6.tgz
The RedHat version is at
ftp://kitenet.net/pub/code/alien/extra/alien-extra-6-1.i386.rpm
The Stampede version is at
ftp://kitenet.net/pub/code/alien/extra/alien-extra-6.slp
Please report any bugs in alien to the author:
Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>
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