Alien - A conversion tool for packages :)

I rarely find a case where Fedora/Centos/Rhel lacks a package for something on debian/ubuntu. In fact as mature package management systems become increasingly common such as emerge,yum, dpkg/apt, yast, and pkgsrc. I expect this will become increasingly rare amongst distro's as time goes on. In the long run there are few solutions but there is one I prefer... Alien :)

Alien
Website: http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/alien/
Source URL: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/alien
GIT: git://git.kitenet.net/alien
Apt: sudo apt-get install alien

Conversion of an *.deb file to *.rpm file.

Usage:

workbox:~/Downloads$ wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/debreate/files/debreate/0.7/debreate_0.7.0-0_all.deb/download

workbox:~/Downloads$ sudo alien -r --scripts debreate_0.7.0-0alpha5_all.deb
debreate-0.7.0-1.noarch.rpm generated

Most notably this conversion tool works with the following formats:

Rhel/Centos/Fedora : rpm
Debian/Ubuntu : deb
Stampede : slp
Slackware/Slax : tgz
Solaris/*BSD : pkg

Enjoy!