And In Reality, Aren't We All Aliens?

You may remember that I said I was going to install ical, an old Linux/Unix calendar program. Well, I downloaded the source and tried to compile it but there were multiple errors in the source code which probably have something to do with the version of the compiler I'm using. (The source is rather old.)

However, back in FC4 days I did create a binary RPM for ical. And Debian based GNU/Linux systems have a program called alien which can convert RPM packages into Debian packages. So the procedure (once I installed alien) is:

# Start with the old RPM file:
$ sudo alien --to-deb ical-2.3.1-1.i386.rpm
# Creates a package called ical_2.3.1-2_i386.deb
# Now install it:
$ sudo dpkg -i ical_2.3.1-2_i386.deb

and, voila, ical is installed and works.

This isn't the optimal way of installing software, but it'll do, it'll do.