Alien is a program that converts between Red Hat rpm, Debian deb, Stampede slp, Slackware tgz, and Solaris pkg 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. It also supports LSB packages.
Run this command to install alien and other necessary packages:
sudo apt-get install alien dpkg-dev debhelper build-essential
To convert a package from rpm to debian format, use this command syntax. The sudo may not be necessary, but we’ll include it just in case.
sudo alien packagename.rpm
To install the package, you’ll use the dpkg utility, which is the internal package management tool behind debian and Ubuntu.
sudo dpkg -i packagename.deb
