The Alien package converter:

  Alien is a program that converts between the rpm, dpkg, and slackware
  tgz file formats. If you want to use a package from another
  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.

Warning, alien can be dangerous:

  Despite the high version number, alien is still (and will probably
  always be) rather experimental software. It's been under development
  for over a year now, but there are still many bugs and limitations.

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

Getting alien:

  The newest versions of alien are available at the alien home page;
  drop by http://kitenet.net/programs/alien/

  On sunsite and its mirrors, alien is located in the
  pub/Linux/utils/scripts/ directory.

  You can also get rpm or deb packages of alien: 
  deb: ftp://master.debian.org/debian/unstable/binary-all/admin/alien_*.deb
  rpm: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/contrib/noarch/alien-*.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.

  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.

  Attention, Slackware and Red Hat users: Bruce S. Babcock
  <BABCOCK@MATH.PSU.EDU> has put together an "alien-extra"
  package of all the extra files you need to use alien on
  a Red Hat or Slackware system. 
  The Slackware version is at 
	  ftp://kitenet.net/pub/code/alien/extra/alien-extra.tgz
  The RedHat version is at
	  ftp://kitenet.nt/pub/code/alien/extra/alien-extra-1.i386.rpm

Please report any bugs in alien to the author: 

  Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>
