A friend of mine uses RPM and has many custom in house developed packages of his own and wants to switch to Ubuntu.
The question he asked me was; Can I use RPM packages with Ubuntu instead of .deb ? as it is almost impossible recompiling all packages he has already.
Note: The question is about working Natively with RPM packages (not to convert RPM to deb using Alien)
Thanks.
Install an RPM Package on Ubuntu Linux
Installing software on Ubuntu usually entails using Synaptic or by using an apt-get command from the terminal. Unfortunately, there are still a number of packages out there that are only distributed in RPM format.
There’s a utility called Alien that converts packages from one format to the other. This doesn’t always mean that an rpm will work on your system, though. You will need to install some prerequisite software packages in order to install alien, however. These packages include gcc and make.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/install-an-rpm-package-on-ubuntu-linux/
