Converting a deb into rpm using alien on openSUSE

The alien command is used by almost all system administrators. You might come across situations where you may need to install a .deb package on an OpenSUSE machine. You will need to convert it to a .rpm prior to doing the installation. The alien command is simply a way to convert or install an alien binary package.

Photo credits: comicvine.com
Photo credits: comicvine.com

Installing Alien on OpenSUSE Leap

A general idea of how to install a .deb package on an OpenSUSE by converting it to a .rpm file can be done with the command alien. If you have freshly install OpenSUSE Leap, you might notice that command zypper install alien gives you the following error.

Screenshot from 2016-03-29 16-37-48

This can be solved easily as there is no repositories available. You can just jump on the Kamikaz Repo of the openSUSE factory. and fire the following commands :

zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:KAMiKAZOW/openSUSE_Leap_42.1/home:KAMiKAZOW.repo
zypper refresh
zypper install alien

You  would have a result similar to this with all the dependencies installed.

Screenshot from 2016-03-29 16-43-42

You can finally launched the zypper install alien which will look similar to this.

Screenshot from 2016-03-29 16-44-24

Let’s now convert a .deb into a .rpm

I will take the example of the nmap tool. I have downloaded the nmap .deb file from the Ubuntu repo. You can choose your own deb file. This is the link to download the nmap from the Ubuntu repo.

wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/n/nmap/nmap_7.01-2ubuntu1_amd64.deb

So to convert the file into a .rpm you need to launch the following command

alien --to-rpm <deb file name here>

Of course, on an openSUSE machine you would need the spec file. Here is an idea what kind of error you might came across.

Screenshot from 2016-03-29 16-56-07

Solving the error

The error “rpmbuild not found” clearly give a hint that the package rpmbuild is not found on the machine. Just install in with :

zypper install rpmbuild

Now that the rpmbuild package is installed with all the dependencies you can relaunch the command which in my case is

alien --to-rpm nmap_7.01-2ubuntu1_amd64.deb 

A nice message message where the package.rpm is generated will be prompted. I have just taken the nmap package as a example. It’s generally inadvisable to run alien on a machine having both RPMs and DEBs package because the two systems do not share installed-file database information. You can chose your own .deb file. Have funs with aliens.

 

Nitin J Mutkawoa https://tunnelix.com

Blogger at tunnelix.com | Founding member of cyberstorm.mu | An Aficionado Journey in Opensource & Linux – And now It's a NASDAQ touch!

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