Do you know that Alien?

If you have an rpm file for a package you wish to install, and if you cannot find a .deb debian package in any of the Ubuntu repositories or elsewhere, you can use the alien package converter application to install the .rpm file.

Despite the large version number(latest version is 8.74), alien is still (and will probably always be) rather experimental software. It has been used by many people for many years, but there are still many bugs and limitations.

Alien should not be used to replace important system packages, like sysvinit, shared libraries, or other things that are essential for the functioning of your system. Many of these packages are set up differently by Debian and Red Hat, and packages from the different distributions cannot be used interchangably. In general, if you can’t uninstall the package without breaking your system, don’t try to replace it with an alien version.

To install alien type the following in terminal.

sudo apt-get install alien

To convert the package.rpm into a package.deb use the following in terminal. [should be done after installation of alien :)]

alien -d package-name.rpm