Aug 23
apt-get
The Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) is one of the most remarkable contributions made by the The Debian Project to the wider Linux community. It’s a package manager first introduced with Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 in 1999.
APT is frequently hailed as one of Debian’s (and derivatives)stronger features. The tool is so well respected that it’s spawned several projects aimed to port it into other operating systems such as OpenSolaris and Mac OS X not to mention other Linux flavors and packaging systems (apt-rpm, for instance, is an APT for Red Hat and systems using the rpm packagin system such as SuSE).
APT’s flagship user application is the line command apt-get which is included by default with any Debian or Debian-based distribution.
Using apt-get is simple enough. All you need is to know what package you want to install –but by name, every package has a short name, that’s the one you need to know.
Using apt-get to install or remove packages and other useful options.
For instance, let’s say you want NDISWrapper installed in your Linux (say it’s Ubuntu). The thing to know is that the package’s name in the repository is not NDISWrapper but ndiswrapper-common, so you open up a terminal and type this
sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common
you give the system your password and if you haven’t installed other packages needed for this one to work in advance, apt-get is going to search them up and install them for you by itself.
apt-get has plenty of other functionalities besides package installation. The most obvious one is the removal of packages. If you got fed up of NDISwrapper and want to uninstall it you simply go to the terminal and write
sudo apt-get remove ndiswrapper-common
Other very useful options are:
apt-get update to resynchronize the packages database in your system with those in the repositories.
apt-get upgrade to have all your installed packages upgraded to the newest available version (you need to run the apt-get update beforehand).
apt-get source [package-name] to download the package’s source code.
apt-get dist-upgrade will upgrade your whole distro (so if you’re running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 you’ll go to Gutsy Gibbon 7.10).
Note: if you are going to install a big package or anything that needs a big download, make sure you do it while your resources are availalbe (your bandwith is clear, enough disk space, etc) in order to do the thing in one go. It makes life easier.Installing multiple packages.
You don’t need to write a line for every package you want. You can instead type all the package’s names in one single command
sudo apt-get install [name1] [name2] [name3]
apt-get with a GUI
If you are less of a typer and more of a point and clicker, there are plenty of options for you to use apt-get. GNOME’s Synaptic Package Manager, for instance, is a GTK+ graphical front end for apt-get (with some extra advantages such as a searchable package index). KDE has the Adept Package Manager.
