Installing alien

[newcomer16]

Hi,
I am a new user of ubuntu. i am having trouble installing alien.deb. i downloaded the package. to install it, i put the package in the current directrory then used sudo apt-get install alien.deb. The package was not installed and i just got error messages like ''E: Couldn't find package alien_8.69_all.13ubuntu_all''

I kindly request for any help on how to go about the installation of any downloaded deb package(with or without unfulfilled dependencies)

Thanks

[tabibito]

As I know apt-get is only to be used to install something from the repository. You should use dpkg to install from a .deb file. Try typing the following in your terminal:


sudo dpkg -i alien.deb

Alternatively, you could just double-click the .deb file to run it from GDebi package installer, you could also run the GDebi package installer from Applications-->System Tools menu and the open the .deb file from there.

[jacksaff]

You don't generally have to download packages independently in linux. Alien is in the repositories so

sudo apt-get install alien

If for some reason you need to download a version different to the one in the repo, then kubuntu has kde set up to just click the .deb and a dialog will pop up. I assume ubuntu has similar.

dpkg -i packagename

will also install a .deb that you have downloaded.

[newcomer16]

thanks friends.