09-18-2008
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Join Date: Mar 2008
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Debian / Ubuntu has limited support for installing RPM packages via the "alien" utility. It comes with pretty much the warnings broli already gave, but for a simple user-space utility, it works just fine. The most common problem is that different distros have different conventions for where a package should store library files, startup scripts, cron jobs, etc. If it's just a simple binary in /usr/bin with no package pre/post-install scripts or funky configuration files, you should be able to cope (but then you might as well recompile from source and make your own package for your own distro; there are tools for doing that automatically at least for Debian-based distros).