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Despite the large version number, alien is still (and will probably always
be) rather experimental software. It has been used by many people for many
years, but there are still many bugs and limitations.
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.
News
RSS
version 8.86
alien 8.86 released with these changes
Filter out illegal characters in version number when building a deb. Closes: #648531
Posted at lunch time on Saturday, November 12th, 2011
version 8.85
alien 8.85 released with these changes
Avoid breaking on spaces in filenames. Closes: #618636
Posted Sunday afternoon, June 19th, 2011
Downloading alien
Alien is available as the alien package in Debian.
Currently the best place to download the tarball is from http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/alien
Its git repository is git://git.kitenet.net/alien
Other things you'll need
To use alien, you will need several other programs. Alien is a perl program, and requires perl version 5.004 or greater.
To convert packages to or from rpms, you need the Red Hat Package Manager; get it from its website.
If you want to convert packages into debian packages, you will need the dpkg, dpkg-dev, and debhelper packages, which are available on the
Debian packages site. You'll also need gcc, and make.
Attention, all linux users who don't use Debian: Bruce S. Babcock has put together a package of all the extra files you need to use alien on a non-Debian distribution. It's called "alien-extra", and you can download it from his ftp site.
I've blogged a few times about alien. Alien use patterns examines who I think is using alien now, and this post gives some historical background.
Links: blog/entry/Flattr FOSS blog/entry/Flattr stats blog/entry/autopackage designed by monkeys blog/entry/package news feeds code
Last edited in the wee hours of Friday night, July 24th, 2010
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.
News
RSS
version 8.86
alien 8.86 released with these changes
Filter out illegal characters in version number when building a deb. Closes: #648531
Posted at lunch time on Saturday, November 12th, 2011
version 8.85
alien 8.85 released with these changes
Avoid breaking on spaces in filenames. Closes: #618636
Posted Sunday afternoon, June 19th, 2011
Downloading alien
Alien is available as the alien package in Debian.
Currently the best place to download the tarball is from http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/alien
Its git repository is git://git.kitenet.net/alien
Other things you'll need
To use alien, you will need several other programs. Alien is a perl program, and requires perl version 5.004 or greater.
To convert packages to or from rpms, you need the Red Hat Package Manager; get it from its website.
If you want to convert packages into debian packages, you will need the dpkg, dpkg-dev, and debhelper packages, which are available on the
Debian packages site. You'll also need gcc, and make.
Attention, all linux users who don't use Debian: Bruce S. Babcock has put together a package of all the extra files you need to use alien on a non-Debian distribution. It's called "alien-extra", and you can download it from his ftp site.
I've blogged a few times about alien. Alien use patterns examines who I think is using alien now, and this post gives some historical background.
Links: blog/entry/Flattr FOSS blog/entry/Flattr stats blog/entry/autopackage designed by monkeys blog/entry/package news feeds code
Last edited in the wee hours of Friday night, July 24th, 2010