Content Management System

Ghost Desktop on Fedora - alien helped me

Mohan Sreekant

Mohan Sreekant

— 1 min read

I wanted to test-ride Ghost Desktop.

They have packages for Mac, Windows, Linux and Android. Linux package is what I interested in, but they only had one for Ubuntu - deb package. I currently use Fedora 28 on my workstation and laptop. Hence, I needed an rpm package which does not seem to be available anywhere.

I had read about a universal package converter, alien. It was time to use it. Luckily, I found it in Fedora repositories. So,

sudo dnf install alien

The conversion of a deb package to an rpm can be done as shown

sudo alien --to-rpm ./ghost-desktop-1.7.0-debian.deb

The rpm was generated without any issue. sudo is important while using alien for conversion else it will throw the following warning at you:

Warning: alien is not running as root!
Warning: Ownerships of files in the generated packages will probably be wrong.

However, when I tried to install the rpm I was greeted with the following error:

Error: Transaction check error:   file / from install of Ghost-1.7.0-2.x86_64 conflicts with file from package filesystem-3.8-2.fc28.x86_64   file /usr/bin from install of Ghost-1.7.0-2.x86_64 conflicts with file from package filesystem-3.8-2.fc28.x86_64   file /usr/lib from install of Ghost-1.7.0-2.x86_64 conflicts with file from package filesystem-3.8-2.fc28.x86_64

I knew Ghost Desktop was an Electron app. If I could just extract the deb package, I could solve my problem. alien to the rescue, again

alien --scripts --generate ghost-desktop-1.7.0-debian.deb

The deb package was extracted and I located the Electron app in <home>/ghost-1.7.0/usr/lib/Ghost/

Test-ride in progress. Happy ending.

Read more