“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…”