However this bit from the readme is hilariously on brand for Linux:
"To use alien, you will need several other programs. Alien is a perl
program, and requires perl version 5.004 or greater. If you use slackware,
make sure you get perl 5.004, the perl 5.003 in slackware does not work
with alien!
To convert packages to or from rpms, you need the Red Hat Package Manager;
get it from Red Hat's ftp site. If your distribution (eg, Red Hat)
provides a rpm-build package, you will need it as well to generate rpms.
If you want to convert packages into debian packages, you will need the
dpkg, dpkg-dev, and debhelper (version 3 or above) packages, which are
available on http://packages.debian.org"