Package management goodness Debian style
After being a RedHat user until about 2002, which is about the time of Redhat 7 or 8, I decided I didn’t want to play the RPM game any more. You know the game, “Dependencies, dependencies, Oh Gosh no, DEPENDENCIES!” Why must I download a bunch of stuff just to install an RPM, and heaven forbid you installed a package from source and RPM just poo’s all over itself. Yes I know that “Yum” fixes alot of  these issues, but hey, it’s a day late and a dollar short!
Debian has the ever awesome, APT package manager. Imagine something so powerful it can change the world with a whisper, then you know APT.
You can update your entire OS with 2 simple steps:
  1. apt-get update #this tells your system what new and updated packages exist.
  2. apt-get -u upgrade #this does the magic, the “-u” tells it to tell you whats up before moving forward.

Easy eh?

How about looking for a package, lets say you want GIMP (Graphic Image Manipulation Program). Let’s find it:

apt-cache search gimp

Awesome.

apt-cache search kernel | grep 2.6

Ohhhh, now we’re getting fancy.

Now let’s install GIMP:
apt-get install gimp

Didn’t like GIMP, let’s remove it:
apt-get remove gimp

There are many more features to APT, so if you haven’t tried a Debian based OS, like Debian, Ubuntu or Kubuntu, load up VirtualBox and create a Debian based VM to tinker with.

Soon I’ll discuss apt-cacher-ng, so you can run a caching apt repo in your house or office to save bandwidth when you have multiple Debian based workstations or servers.

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Filed under: Uncategorized - @ March 23, 2011 12:45 pm

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