"Do you administer multiple distributions and find it frustrating that you can find packages for some distros and not others? Have you ever tried looking for a .rpm only to find a .deb (or vice versa)? Sometimes, Linux can be maddening.
"Luckily, there's a program that can help solve this problem: alien. alien is a script that converts between the Red Hat .rpm, Debian .dpkg, Stampede .slp, and Slackware .tgz file formats. alien can also handle Solaris' .pkg file format. alien lets you to take a package from a system with a different distribution than the one you are running, and makes it usable on your system..."
