The Linux world is full of different package managers.  Yum, Apt and others can make it complex when a solution doesn’t support a distro (distribution) you are already standardized on.  If the option of compiling yourself is not available, the next option is to convert the available packages or extract them from a distribution that is supported.

First take an inventory of what options are available.  For each distribution research how the packages are built.  The most common are .deb files that leverage apt.  The other common type is rpm.  Often they  are some sort of tar file that has been gzip’d.  If you can extract you can see what file structure they follow.

If actual packages are not available, but a system like apt extracts files and installs, then you can research where the package manager stores its files.  For example, apt stores the “Debian” style packages in /var/cache/apt/archives.  You can spin up a quick system, install the application, and grab the .deb file(s) from there.

After that, see if scripts already exist to extract or convert.  There are tools to convert deb to rpm and visa versa.  Even deb2tgz is still around if you are on Slackware.  Don’t give up – there’s a way!