apt-get or aptitude

Installing Software

When you install software for windows, there is many ways to go about that.  You can have a CD-ROM with the program and install directly from that.  You can download a zip file, extract the files and install the extracted program.  You can download an installer that will then download the necessary files off the net.

With Linux, there is also a variety of ways.  One of these is using apt-get or aptitude.  You may have seen on the internet instructions on installing some software within debian or ubuntu where someone gave the command apt-get install <program>.  The alternative is to replace apt-get with aptitude.  What’s the difference?

From the users point of view, there is no difference.  However confirmed reliable sources have brought out the fact that aptitude will handle dependencies much better.

To quote IRONWALKER from the linuxquestions.org forum:

Aptitude is said to deal with dependencies better than apt-get. For example, say you install a package which automatically installs some library packages because it depends on them. When you remove this package with apt-get, it won’t remove the libraries this package installed, although they aren’t used anymore.

When you install that package with aptitude and remove it with aptitude, aptitude ‘detects’ that those library packages aren’t used anymore and will therefore automatically remove them.

To sum up, aptitude will clean things up when you remove a program.  It will also check to make sure no other program needs the files it wants to remove before doing so.

The thing to keep in mind is that if you chose to use one over the other, be consistent.

Graphical Interface

Synaptic Package Manager

For those who are running Gnome desktop interface (or KDE), you can use Synaptic.  This nice program will divide up the available programs into categories for you.  You can even search for whatever type of app you are interested in.

If you prefer to hang out in the CLI, you can issue aptitude by itself on the command line and get this interface.

aptitude package manager

It’s fairly easy and similar to the Synaptic Package Manager.  You can search for applications you’re interested in, you can install packages and uninstall them.  Not only can you navigate using your arrow keys on your keyboard, it also responds to your mouse.  Click on the menu above, or an item to the left to open it up.

This is one sweet app you should familiarize yourself if you like to move around the CLI, especially if you have a system setup without a GUI.

Of course, if you know the name of an application, you can just command line it and not enter the package manager.  For instance, you can just enter sudo aptitude install <filename>.  If you are unsure if an app exists, or perhaps it’s name, use aptitude search <filename>.    AND, as if that’s not enough, if you know just part of the name, enter that in.

The following command yields these results:  aptitude search blend

p   blender                                                     – Very fast and versatile 3D modeller/renderer
p   blender-ogrexml                                  – Blender Exporter for Ogre
p   enblend                                                    – Tool for compositing images
p   kwin-style-blended                             – a window decoration theme for KDE

Surprise

If you do bring up the aptitude package manager and find yourself in need of a little time killer, hit Ctrl-T and then P.

This works on my Debian system, but on my Ubuntu box it drops me back to the command line with the following message: “Ouch!  Got SIGABRT, dying..”   –  Weird.  I’ll have to figure that out another day.