As all of you know, Ubuntu is a Debian-based distro, which means that it uses the .deb packages, but the more I work with Ubuntu, the more I discover that many packages are available in .rpm format only (or alternatively you can download and compile the source yourself of course, but that’s not what I recommend especially for beginners), what’s the solution then?? It’s simply “Alien”, and what is alien? It’s a package converter software that can simply convert .rpm packages to .deb ones!! It’s as simple as this:

sudo apt-get install alien //to download the alien software
sudo alien packageToBeConverted.rpm //where $path is the path to the .rpm file

You’ll then simply find the corresponding .deb file in the same folder as the source .rpm file, happy conversion 🙂