Alien is a useful tool that facilitates conversions between Red Hat rpm, Debian deb, Stampede slp, Slackware tsz, and Solaris pkg file formats.
RPM is a package format used by Red Hat-based derivatives like CentOS, RHEL or Fedora. The name comes from the RPM Package Manager (RPM), a free and open-source package management system for installing, uninstalling, and managing software packages in Linux.
Is it possible to install .rpm files on Debian based distributions like Ubuntu? The answer is yes. However, you need to be careful as it could lead to package dependency conflicts.
To improve the stability of the installation process, we need to convert the .rpm file to a .deb file format.
To install Alien follow these steps:
1. Check the status of the Universe distribution component:
sudo add-apt-repository universe
2. Make sure that your repositories are up-to-date:
sudo apt-get update
3. The following command installs the Alien conversion tool:
sudo apt-get install alien
Now that Alien has been installed, it’s time to convert the files to the .deb format to complete the installation. Go to the folder where the .rpm file is located and enter the following command:
sudo alien packagename.rpm
This command instructs the Alien tool to initiate the conversion process of the .rpm file to a .deb file.