How to install alien in Ubuntu 14.04?

I have Ubuntu 14.04, I want to install Alien; I tried:

sudo apt-get install alien libaio1 unixodbc vim

the result is:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
alien is already the newest version.
libaio1 is already the newest version.
unixodbc is already the newest version.
vim is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 403 not upgraded.

When I tried: sudo apt-get install alien

the result was

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?

Plz help in installing alien.

2 Answers

try running the following commands in terminal.

sudo apt-get install alien dpkg-dev debhelper build-essential

Run following command to change the format of the package.

sudo alien filename.rpm

install the .deb package:

sudo dpkg -i filename.deb

the otherway:- install gdebi

sudo apt-get install gdebi 

now right click on .deb file and open with gdebi

List the output of alien first. You may want to use sudo apt reinstall alien. This has helped me in 80% of my problems.