Are centos programms compatible with ubuntu?

Question

It's a long story, but it ends with me having ubuntu 12.04 installed on my computer and a bunch of Centos programs on a thumb drive.

I was just wondering if these would be compatible and usually like to ask a question before I possibly crash my system...

My box is a Compaq evoD500

Answer 1

In short Maybe. CentOS is an operating system that is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. While Ubuntu is based on Debian.

Package will not be portable between them. However systems are almost the same, software developed for one can usually easily be compiled for the other, it just has to be compiled and packaged a little differently.

But using Alien you probably can. Alien is a program that converts between Red Hat rpm, Debian deb, Stam‐pede slp, Slackware tgz, and Solaris pkg file formats. If you want to use a package from another linux distribution than the one you have installed on your system, you can use alien to convert it to your pre‐ferred package format and install it. It also supports LSB packages.¹

To install it, you can do so from USC

^{1Source: Ubuntu Manuals}

P.S. Alien probably will not work with everything. Make sure you test before attempting.