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How to convert RPM files to DEB files with Alien

Very often we find a package is available only Red Hat Linux and variants like Fedora, and not for our Ubuntu and variants. There is simple but very efficient way to take your .rpm files (Red Hat) and transform them into installable .deb files for Ubuntu and family.

The converting is done by an application called Alien – “it 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. “

To begin install Alien from the repositories with

sudo apt-get install alien

To convert a file from .rpm to .deb do;

sudo alien -k your_file.rpm

Your newly obtained .deb files can be installed manually or from the command-line with:

sudo dpkg -i your_newly_obtained_file.deb

With Alien you can also directly install .rpm files on Ubuntu without necessarily converting them. This command does exactly that;

sudo alien -i your_file.rpm

To convert from .deb to .rpm for whatever reason do;

$ sudo alien -r your_deb_file.deb