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All I really wanted was to use GridTracker. It’s a program that maps your
contacts live as you are using digital modes like FT8. The problem was, there
wasn’t an easy way to install it on Ubuntu. Well, easy is debatable, but there
certainly was no deb package that you could just install. Granted, in
situations like this it is often best to build from source to make sure that it
is properly set up for your machine. But, if you want a quick shortcut, there
is always alien.
According to the manpage for alien:
alien is a program that converts between Red Hat rpm, Debian deb,
Stampede slp, Slackware\n tgz, and Solaris pkg file formats. If you want
to use a package from another linux\n distribution than the one you have
installed on your system, you can use alien to convert\n it to your
preferred package format and install it. It also supports LSB
packages.\n\nhttp://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man1/alien.1p.html
It is really easy to install and even easier to use in Ubuntu. You can install
it from the normal repository:
$ sudo apt-get install alien
and to use it you simply give it an input file that you want to convert, like
so:
$ alien -d ./gridtracker-1.21.0928-1.x86_64.rpm \ngridtracker_1.21.0928-
2_amd64.deb generated
The “-d” specifies you want a deb package. Of course, “-r” will convert a deb
package into an rpm file. Depending on your system setup, you may need to run
this as root or with sudo, especially if installing the package after built
with the “-i” flag. The most important caveat is that this may still have
dependency issues and the like, so your mileage may vary, but this worked
rather well for me!
Linux – keep it simple.