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From Ubuntu to Fedora or vice versus.

PostPosted: Thu Sep 08, 2011 5:57 pm
by TheeMahn
I am not a Fedora man personally, however I have used it. This post is intended for newbies to Fedora / Ubuntu / Ultimate Edition. There is a nice tool at your disposal that I would like to shed light to called alien. I am going to utilize this tool to build Ultimate Player since it currently does not exist for Fedora not that I have to - there are other ways. I am all about education, lets begin.

In Ubuntu / Debian / Ultimate Edition land; from the terminal (sudo unnecessary from Debian):
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sudo apt-get install alien



OOPS:
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theemahn@SledgeHammer:~$ sudo apt-get install alien
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
alien is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

alien is built into Ultimate Edition ;) Funny how many tools that are under the hood in Ultimate Edition go unnoticed. O.K. This is a Fedora thread right?

In Fedora from the terminal:
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yum install alien


O.K. From here forward commands should be the same, we are learning alien. Since a rpm (redhat package manager) does not exist of Ultimate Player I went to our website not that I had to and pulled it down as a deb and thus we begin:
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theemahn@SledgeHammer:~/Downloads$ sudo alien -r ultimate-player_0.7.3_lucid_amd64.deb
[sudo] password for theemahn:
tar: Record size = 16 blocks
ultimate-player-0.7.3-2.x86_64.rpm generated
theemahn@SledgeHammer:~/Downloads$


The same can be done with a rpm to make it into a deb:
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theemahn@SledgeHammer:~/Downloads$ alien --help
Usage: alien [options] file [...]
  file [...]                Package file or files to convert.
  -d, --to-deb              Generate a Debian deb package (default).
     Enables these options:
       --patch=<patch>      Specify patch file to use instead of automatically
                            looking for patch in /var/lib/alien.
       --nopatch       Do not use patches.
       --anypatch           Use even old version os patches.
       -s, --single         Like --generate, but do not create .orig
                            directory.
       --fixperms           Munge/fix permissions and owners.
       --test               Test generated packages with lintian.
  -r, --to-rpm              Generate a Red Hat rpm package.
      --to-slp              Generate a Stampede slp package.
  -l, --to-lsb              Generate a LSB package.
  -t, --to-tgz              Generate a Slackware tgz package.
     Enables these options:
       --description=<desc> Specify package description.
       --version=<version>  Specify package version.
  -p, --to-pkg              Generate a Solaris pkg package.
  -i, --install             Install generated package.
  -g, --generate            Generate build tree, but do not build package.
  -c, --scripts             Include scripts in package.
  -v, --verbose             Display each command alien runs.
      --veryverbose         Be verbose, and also display output of run commands.
  -k, --keep-version        Do not change version of generated package.
      --bump=number         Increment package version by this number.
  -h, --help                Display this help message.
  -V, --version          Display alien's version number.

theemahn@SledgeHammer:~/Downloads$


Nice tool most are oblivious to ;) I hope I helped someone out.

TheeMahn

Re: From Ubuntu to Fedora or vice versus.

PostPosted: Thu Sep 29, 2011 1:33 pm
by dougal
Yep, I found Alien a while back when looking to automate .tar packages. I could never remember the few steps to installing the .tar. Alien is a God send. It doesn't always work. I think there are some badly built packages out there that Alien cannot complete the .deb files and so on for.
I like it though...

It is nice to share.