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44 lines
2.1 KiB
Plaintext
44 lines
2.1 KiB
Plaintext
Alien is a program that converts rpm, dpkg, or slackware tgz packages into
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rpm or dpkg packages. If you're using Debian or Red Hat and you want to
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install a package from one of the other distributions, you can use alien to
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convert it to your preferred package format and install it.
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Despite the high version number, alien is still (and will probably always
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be) rather experimental software. It has been used and tested by Debian
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users for many months, but there are still many limitations. For one thing,
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Alien only handles binary packages, not source packages. It also doesn't try
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to convert the scripts that should be run when the package installs.
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Alien should not be used to replace important system packages, like sysvinit,
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shared libraries, or other things that are essential for the functioning of
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your system. Many of these packages are set up differently by Debian and
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Red Hat, and packages from the different distributions cannot be used
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interchangably. In general, if you can't uninstall the package without
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breaking your system, don't try to replace it with an alien version.
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Alien has successfully been used for converting add on software, such as
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Applixware, Metro X, and many other packages.
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Getting alien:
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Alien will be available on Sunsite, but it hasn't moved out of Incoming yet.
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For now, you can get it at the alien home page:
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http://kite.ml.org/programs/alien/
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You can also get rpm or deb packages of alien:
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deb: ftp://master.debian.org/debian/unstable/binary-all/admin/alien_5.0.deb
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rpm: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/contrib/RPMS/alien-5.0-1.i386.rpm
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Other things you'll need:
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To use alien, you will need several other programs. Alien is a perl program,
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and requires perl version 5 or greater. You must also have the Getopt::Long
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perl module installed on your system. I believe this is a standard part of
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perl.
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To convert packages to or from rpms, you need the Red Hat Package Manager;
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get it from Red Hat's ftp site.
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If you want to convert packages into debian packages, you will need the dpkg,
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dpkg-dev, and debmake packages, which are available on the Debian ftp site.
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