APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) is the standard software package management system for Debian and its derivatives.
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What is the real difference between “apt-get” and “aptitude”? (How about “wajig”?)
I know that both apt-get and aptitude are command line package management interfaces on Debian derived Linux, with different options, but I'm still somewhat confused. Under the hood, aren't they ...
37
votes
1answer
40k views
Check package version using apt-get/aptitude?
Before I install a package I'd like to know what version i would get. How do I check the version before installing using apt-get or aptitude on debian or ubuntu?
25
votes
5answers
10k views
Convince apt-get *not* to use IPv6 method
The ISP I work at is setting up an internal IPv6 network in preparation for eventually connecting to the IPv6 internet. As a result, several of the servers in this network now try to connect to ...
13
votes
2answers
470 views
Why do package names contain version numbers?
While working with Ubuntu and other Debian-based distros, I've noticed that packages in the software repos often contain the major version number.
For example,
Apache: apache2
Tomcat: tomcat7
PHP: ...
12
votes
4answers
4k views
List packages by installation date
How can I list installed packages by installation date? I installed a lot of stuff to compile a certain piece of code, and I want to get a list of the required packages, which are the ones I installed ...
10
votes
2answers
2k views
What is yum equivalent of 'apt-get update'?
Debian's apt-get update fetches and updates the package index. Because I'm used to this way of doing things, I was surprised to find that yum update does all that and upgrades the system. This made ...
10
votes
5answers
4k views
“tar: unrecognized option --warning” during 'apt-get install'
I just ran apt-get upgrade on my debian 5 vps and I got this error:
tar: unrecognized option `--warning=no-timestamp'
Now when I try to install other packages e.g: imagemagick I get the same ...
10
votes
2answers
9k views
What is Fedora's equivalent of 'apt-get purge'?
In Debian, there's at least two ways to delete a package:
apt-get remove pkgname
apt-get purge pkgname
The first preserves system-wide config files (i.e. those found in "/etc"), while the second ...
9
votes
6answers
887 views
Why does xargs cause apt-get to abort?
I'm trying to remove a list of packages from a file. I'm using the following command:
cat packages | xargs sudo apt-get remove
packages is my file containing a list of packages I want to remove. ...
9
votes
2answers
804 views
Is it possible to simulate installation of Debian packages, still marking them installed?
Here's what I would like. Start with a virtual system with no installed packages. Then I invoke a tool similar to apt-get to ask it to compute the dependencies and mark all the packages that would be ...
8
votes
2answers
234 views
How to list files and folders that are not maintained by any DEB package
I am in the process of moving my files from one Debian machine to another so that I can use the old machine for a different purpose. I do not want to miss any file because I will be formatting the ...
7
votes
2answers
816 views
List (recursive) dependencies of the installed packages in APT
For each package I have installed I would like to know which packages would be installed if I uninstall it. An example of the output I need is (package: list of deps):
abc: foo bar
bcd: baz abc
bdd: ...
7
votes
4answers
509 views
How can I reliably “hold” a package in Debian?
I have a package in Debian that has been manually patched (not ideal, I know) that I must hold at its current version so upgrades don't overwrite the patched changes (I will manually inspect and apply ...
7
votes
1answer
365 views
Debian: How to delay configuration when installing/upgrading?
One of my Debian systems is rarely upgraded. So when it is time to upgrade, there are loads of packages. Right now I basically have to monitor the upgrade, because every 50 packages or so there is a ...
6
votes
1answer
3k views
How to install some packages from “unstable” Debian on a computer running “stable” Debian?
On a computer running "stable" Debian, when trying to install a package which is in the unstable list on the Debian web site using the "aptitude install /unstable" command, I get output similar to ...
6
votes
3answers
1k views
How to see package version without install?
I want to see the version of a package before I install it. How can I do this?
6
votes
1answer
100 views
How did this bogus entry sneak into my apt sources?
A while ago, I decided to try dropbox. Since I could apt-get it, I thought it was free software.
However, I quickly discovered that the apt-get command only downloaded a downloader for dropbox ...
6
votes
2answers
110 views
Removed apt-get from Ubuntu
Well my fingers did manage to do sudo apt-get remove libstdc++6 and write, yes. That removed alot of system files. Is there any way to bring it up working again? I have connected to terminal, and wget ...
6
votes
3answers
688 views
In debian based systems, how do we purge configuration files of packages that have already been uninstalled?
To be more specific, I would like to do the equivalent of adding the --purge flag to the following command
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge [package name]
to packages that are no longer on the ...
6
votes
1answer
118 views
Blocking kernel updates with dpkg
I'd like to block all distribution-shipped kernel updates due to a nasty thing that recently happened to me. (I'm on a Ubuntu 12.04 amd64 derivative.)
I'd like to block all updates to installed ...
5
votes
3answers
366 views
How to install/default to the command line version of Emacs?
I installed Emacs using sudo apt-get install emacs. The problem is that when I launch Emacs from the command line (e.g. emacs main.c) it opens Emacs with a GUI. I prefer the command line version which ...
5
votes
3answers
1k views
apt-get equivalent of yum localinstall
When using Fedora I usually use yum localinstall as a way to install a rpm obtained outside the distribution repositories. I can't find an equivalent option in the apt-get man page. I'm running Ubuntu ...
5
votes
4answers
2k views
List available updates but do not install them
I want my cron-run reporting script to notify me in case there are updates for my packages. Is the a way to make apt-get give me the list of available updates but don't do anything more?
5
votes
1answer
4k views
apt-get doesn't stop on Ctrl-c, what to do?
Occasionally I have connection problem with apt-get (typically because I use it behind a proxy and try to install/upgrade flash). I have been trying sending Ctrlc but it would not stop. I thought it ...
5
votes
2answers
446 views
How do I find installed packages that have no install candidate?
I'd like to retrieve a list of installed packages that have no install candidate (e.g., because I removed an apt source file entry). How would I do that on Debian-based systems?
5
votes
1answer
310 views
Conflict? dpkg, apt, apt-get, aptitude, and synaptic
So, I ssh into a (very) remote Ubuntu 10.4 server to do some admin and web dev+design. And I was looking through the various package manager options.
There's a lot.
The big ones are dpkg, apt, ...
5
votes
2answers
534 views
What's up with this 'gnome' package?
I have recently grown tired of the way Rhythmbox starts up every time I plug in my MP3 player. I know I could simply disable this, but I've decided to uninstall Rhythmbox instead. It's such a ...
5
votes
1answer
115 views
apt-get - How to complain on failed upgrade?
I'm trying to write a script to upgrade a bunch of remote machines and would like to verify that one package in particular is upgraded.
With yum, I could say yum upgrade specific-package, and it ...
5
votes
4answers
2k views
Apt-get autocompletion
I am currently running 64-bit Debian Wheezy.
I am having some trouble with auto completion for apt-get. I have bash-completion installed.
If I am logged in as root in a shell, I can use auto ...
5
votes
2answers
39 views
How to install Suggests dependencies of a package
If I want to install a package and its Suggests dependencies, I run:
$ sudo apt-get --install-suggests install <package name>
However, if <package name> is already installed, and not ...
5
votes
3answers
428 views
Managing unofficial repositories on a Debian system
A few years ago I added this repository to my sources.list:
http://www.deb-multimedia.org/
because it contained packages like acroread or flash player, which were either missing or out of date in ...
5
votes
2answers
964 views
Restore /etc/ configuration files from the default
Is there a way to replace /etc configuration files from a package, overwriting my local changes? I've tried apt-get install --reinstall mypackage but it doesn't update the files.
How can I do this?
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votes
2answers
494 views
Finding an earlier version to downgrade to
On my Debian server, I upgraded the SQLite package to version 3.7.7 but discovered that it contains a critical bug that breaks several things including my Subversion repository. So, I would like to ...
5
votes
2answers
119 views
Yum and recommended/suggested packages
I'd like to install a software package on my Fedora System, but it has a lot of unreasonable dependencies (which I know for sure they are not actually required).
I used to work on Debian, where ...
5
votes
1answer
575 views
apt-get -f install is stuck on “corrupted filesystem tarfile”
I am having issues with apt-get on my Raspberry Pi. This is the output when I try and install a package:
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get -f install cowsay
Reading package lists... Done
Building ...
5
votes
1answer
322 views
disable apt-listchanges (and other interactive stuff) during upgrades (reliably)
I have to admit, I really really hate apt-listchanges. If I'm going to do a huge dist-upgrade, I want to just leave the computer there for a few hours. The asker of this serverfault question had a ...
5
votes
1answer
96 views
To not autoremove something
I have uninstalled my distro's (Debian Wheezy) package of torchat, and use a newer version I've built myself. Since removing the package apt-get wants me to autoremove something which the software ...
5
votes
1answer
178 views
Block a package from being uninstalled in APT
In short, I want to be able to set package abc so that:
apt-get remove abc should fail.
apt-get purge abc should fail.
apt-get upgrade abc should work.
If the package dependencies change so that ...
5
votes
1answer
332 views
Firefox circular-dependency hell on Linux Mint 13
Having difficulty re-installing Firefox, after an installation to resolve places.sqlite issues. It appears that I'm trapped in circular dependency hell.
Need to resolve firefox dependency hell to ...
4
votes
3answers
549 views
How to list currently not installed packages?
I'd like to output a list of all, currently not installed, packages (they are visible in Synaptic for example) using only shell commands.
How do I do this?
4
votes
4answers
145 views
Is it possible to determine what is inside Debian package without installing it?
I need a markdown library for development - based on package names I could not understand which one I should install...
den@playground:~$ sudo aptitude search markdown
p html2markdown ...
4
votes
6answers
3k views
Can I use `apt-get` to upgrade to the latest version of Nagios?
At the time of this writing the latest version of Nagios is 3.3.1. I am running Ubuntu 10.04 and have used apt-get update; apt-get install nagios3 to end up with version 3.2.0.
I know there are a lot ...
4
votes
1answer
563 views
The difference between deb versus deb-src in sources.list
I don't understand the difference between these two lines in my sources.list, please explain:
deb http://mirror.optus.net/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
versus
deb-src ...
4
votes
3answers
2k views
apt-get - autoremove wants to uninstall Gnome
As empathy 2.30 in Debian Wheezy didn't meet all my preferences I tried out empathy 3.1 from experimental, using the command:
apt-get -t experimental install empathy
I had to find out, this version ...
4
votes
1answer
525 views
Pacman option to assume “yes” to every question?
When installing software in debian systems we can put something like this:
sudo apt-get install -y chromium-browser
that way the installation occurs automatically, whitout asking to confirm ...
4
votes
1answer
814 views
Aptitude on Debian 6.0.4 “media change” to CD ROM
I've just installed Debian 6.0.4 on VirtualBox, and I'm trying to install g++. So, into the terminal I typed:
aptitude install build-essential
But it's trying to get the package from disk:
Media ...
4
votes
1answer
646 views
Why did adding the Debian testing repository create so many package dependencies?
I have Debian 6.0.4, and I'm running an outdated Geany text editor package. There's no newer version available in the current stable repository, so I added testing packages to sources.list:
#debian ...
4
votes
1answer
46 views
How does APT deal with different programs with the same name?
I decided to finally learn vi and as I was doing that I realized that vi wasn't behaving as I expected. I learned from another post that this was because, on Ubuntu, vim-tiny is installed by default.
...
4
votes
1answer
1k views
I cannot install new packages: “Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock”
I am new to Linux (installed Ubuntu for the first time yesterday), and have never dealt with any unix-based OS. I started using Linux for the sole purpose of collaborating code with my partners via ...
4
votes
3answers
113 views
Using apt or aptitude to get version information about an uninstalled package?
I'm looking to install a package, but I'd like to make sure that I can't get a more recent version than, e.g., a PPA.
Is there an aptitude or apt-get command that will enable me to input a package ...
