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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
linux 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://ftp.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 5.004 or greater. If you use slackware,
make sure you get perl 5.004, the perl 5.003 in slackware does not work
with alien!
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://ykbsb2.yk.psu.edu/pub/alien/alien-extra.tgz
The RedHat version is at
ftp://ykbsb2.yk.psu.edu/pub/alien/alien-extra.rpm
The Stampede version is at
ftp://ykbsb2.yk.psu.edu/pub/alien/alien-extra.slp
Programs that use alien:
I know of one program that acts as a frontend to alien - kpackviewer is a
package viewer that can convert between package formats by using alien. It's
homepage is at http://www.momentus.com.br/users/hook/kpackviewer.html
Please report any bugs in alien to the author:
Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>
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