How to Transform Linux Packages Using Alien

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How to Transform Linux Packages Using Alien – Guide

Alien is a Linux program that switches between RPM packages, Debian packages, Stampede packages. This program is usually used when you want to use a package from another Linux distribution than the one you have configured and installed on your system. You can then use alien to transform the package into your preferred package format and install it.

Convert Linux packages using Alien

The general syntax for converting Linux packages using Alien from one format to another is:

foreign [–to-deb] [–to-rpm] [–to-tgz] [–to-slp] [options] File […]

Converting packages using Alien is very easy!

To convert a .rpm package to a .deb package, simply run alien as root or sudo user:

$ sudo alien –to-deb /path/to/file.rpm

Likewise, to convert the .deb file to .rpm, run:

$ sudo alien –to-rpm /path/to/file.deb

Here is the list of supported flags for converting Linux packages into different formats.

Let’s look at some examples. For the purpose of this guide, I will use the hello world .rpm package. Note that the hello package is packaged for almost every Linux distribution. So you don’t need to convert it. I am using it for demonstration purposes only.

Convert RPM packages to DEB packages using Alien

Now, let’s convert the hello rpm package to .deb format using Alien as below:

$ sudo alien –to-deb hello-2.10-5.fc34.x86_64.rpm

Or soon,

$ sudo alien -d hello-2.10-5.fc34.x86_64.rpm

This will convert the .rpm package to a .deb package and save the generated package in the current directory.

You can install the generated package using the default package manager.

We can also convert multiple packages at once. The following command will convert the supplied packages (hello & vim) to .deb format.

$ sudo alien hello-2.10-7.x86_64.rpm vim-enhanced-8.2.2637-1.fc34.x86_64.rpm

Convert DEB packages to RPM packages using Alien

Likewise, we can convert the .deb package into a .rpm package file as below:

$ sudo alien –to-rpm hello-2.10-5.fc34.x86_64.rpm

Or soon,

$ sudo alien -r hello-2.10-5.fc34.x86_64.rpm

Install packages automatically

Sometimes you might want to install the auto-generated packages.

To convert a package and install it automatically with Alien, use the -i flag.

$ sudo alien -d -i hello-2.10-7.x86_64.rpm

This command will convert the supplied .rpm package to the .deb package format and then install it and finally remove the generated package.

Sample output:

dpkg –no-force-overwrite -i hello_2.10-8_amd64.deb Selecting unselected package hello. (Reading the database… 52712 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack hello_2.10-8_amd64.deb… Unpacking hello (2.10-8 ) …Configuration up hello (2.10-8) … Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.4-2) …

Convert to multiple package formats

Alien can create multiple package file formats from a single package file. The following example shows how to create .deb and .tgz packages from an .rpm file.

$ sudo alien –to-deb –to-tgz hello-2.10-7.x86_64.rpm

Keep version numbers

By default, Alien adds one to the minor version number of each package it converts. For example, if the version number is 1.2-3, Alien will add one to the minor version and change it to 1.2-4.

Take a look at the following command output.

$ sudo alien –to-deb hello-2.10-7.x86_64.rpmhello_2.10-8_amd64.deb generated

The version of the source package in the above command is 2.10.7. After package conversion, Alien changed the minor version from 7 to 8 in the target file.

If you don’t want Alien to change the version number, use the -k, –keep-version flag to keep the original version number in the generated package.

$ sudo alien -k –to-deb hello-2.10-7.x86_64.rpmhello_2.10-7_amd64.deb generated

As you can see above, the source and destination file have the same version number.

Final note

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