Alien is a program that converts rpm, dpkg, or slackware tgz packages into
rpm or dpkg packages. If you're using Debian or Red Hat and you want to
install a package from one of the other distributions, you can use alien to
convert it to your preferred package format and install it.

Despite the high version number, alien is still (and will probably always
be) rather experimental software. It has been used and tested by Debian
users for many months, but there are still many limitations. For one thing, 
Alien only handles binary packages, not source packages. It also doesn't try
to convert the scripts that should be run when the package installs.

Alien should not be used to replace important system packages, like sysvinit, 
shared libraries, or other things that are essential for the functioning of 
your system. Many of these packages are set up differently by Debian and 
Red Hat, and packages from the different distributions cannot be used 
interchangably. In general, if you can't uninstall the package without 
breaking your system, don't try to replace it with an alien version.

Alien has successfully been used for converting add on software, such as
Applixware, Metro X, and many other packages.

Getting alien:

Alien will be available on Sunsite, but it hasn't moved out of Incoming yet. 
For now, you can get it at the alien home page:
	http://kite.ml.org/programs/alien/

You can also get rpm or deb packages of alien:
deb: ftp://master.debian.org/debian/unstable/binary-all/admin/alien_5.0.deb
rpm: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/contrib/RPMS/alien-5.0-1.i386.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 or greater. You must also have the Getopt::Long
perl module installed on your system. I believe this is a standard part of
perl.

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 debmake packages, which are available on the Debian ftp site.