If you use RedHat, there is rpm installation package and as for Debian, there is also deb install package. Either rpm or deb, it is like msi execution installation package for Windows users. It creates a convenient user friendly straight forward method to install application and you do not need to worry about any library independencies or console command to go through.

But, the problem is sometimes we found rpm package from internet and we want to install it on our Debian system. How to install?

Actually just through a simple application called Alien. What Alien do is more than that, it can converts in between package like Stampede slp, Slackware tgz, and Solaris pkg file formats.

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Let the Alien help you convert rpm to deb

On Linux, you can find quite a lot free stuff. Most of the open source softwares come with its own source code for you to compile. But many Linux newbies don’t know how to compile it.

Here is the method:

Extract the compressed file - tar or tar.bz files in terminal

$ tar -zxvf file.tar.gz

$ tar -jxvf file.tar.bz2

Then goes into the directory:

Step 1: Configure application to suit your system

$ ./configure

Step 2: Compile the application

$ make

Step 3: Install the application

# make install

You might notice some applications will require your root rights to install. So You might need to key in your password before processing to Step 3.

Ubuntu provides a simple way to upgrade the software package in deb format. So, if you want to upgrade any applications, you might just type:

sudo apt-get install <application name>

However, sometimes you might find that either you can find the name because it is not inside the Ubuntu list or latest approved version. To skip this, you can go to directly to your System-> Administration-> Software Sources-> Third Party Software and add in this 2 lines

deb http://repository.debuntu.org/ feisty multiverse
deb-src http://repository.debuntu.org/ feisty multiverse

Then goes back to your terminal do the sudo apt-get to get some of the latest released applications. This is how I get my latest Pidgin 2.2.

Recently, there are some problems with my desktop. It randomly crashed and frozen at there and the Ctrl + Alt + Backspace is not working. I think of the linux users know that when you force shutdown your desktop, you likely to cause some damages on it, especially during your hard disk is in the middle of writting or cache on the Swap.

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How to Restart a Frozen System?