Alien is a program that converts between the rpm, dpkg, stampede slp, and slackware tgz file formats. If you want to use a package from another distribution than the one you have installed on your system, you can use alien to convert it to your preferred package format and install it.
News
Kyle Barry has taken over maintenance of alien. His versions are available from https://sourceforge.net/projects/alien-pkg-convert/
Update: Due to inactivity of that project, there's a new one here https://github.com/Project-OSS-Revival/alien
This rss feed won't be updated for any new releases of alien.
I am no longer maintaining alien. A new maintainer is wanted.
Downloading alien
Alien's website has moved to https://github.com/Project-OSS-Revival/alien
My old git repository for alien is still available at
git://git.joeyh.name/zzattic/alien
I've blogged a few times about alien. Alien use patterns examines who I think is using alien now, and this post gives some historical background.