debian aptitude reference manual

debian aptitude reference manual

Aptitude is text based and run from a terminal.Some time when you need to resolve conflicts, you discover that you made a mistake; you can easily use 'Cancel pending actions' in the 'Actions' menu so that you can re-select.But you should try the aptitude search foo way. You should discover that the output is a bit different from apt-cache, in some cases, it may be useful to search for a package to see if it is already installed.For most people with 32 bit systems that means the Release Notes for Intel x86. For most with 64 bit systems that means the Release Notes for AMD64. Using full-upgrade in the regular course of events is no longer the recommended practice (unless you are running sid, in which case you should not need to be reading this.) Minor release upgrades (e.g. from lenny 5.0.1 to 5.0.2) and security updates are done with safe-upgrade.The last Aptitude release which shipped a GTK interface was Aptitude 0.6.5 (and the according Debian package aptitude 0.6.5-1). The never-finished Qt interface was never included in any official Debian binary package. While the Git history still contains the GTK and Qt code, the current branches HEADs no more have this code. Bringing them (or any of them) back would mean to re-add the code removed in the according commits and to update it to aptitude's current code on the one hand and the current GTK and Qt code bases on the other hand. Hosting provided by Metropolitan Area Network Darmstadt. Currently, there are 60425 packages available for the amd64 architecture. Currently, we recommend the following. Available since Debian Jessie (Debian 8).It is also a fallback option when apt is not available (often with older Debian systems).In other words, the package configuration system makes no intrusive configuration for the sake of convenience.But ones with security risks are disabled in the default installation.This may create interference with popular generic helper programs for the system configuration.http://gdgom.com/upload/200914045506167829xi15r3ooc0xo.xml

• 1.0.

It probably breaks the package consistency which requires deep system management knowledge, such as compiler ABI, library version, interpreter features, etc. I mean that some of the following valid actions are better avoided, as a precaution, until you understand the Debian system very well. Here are some reminders. This is because they work very well, are updated frequently, and offer the latest features. The same can be said for desktop PCs on which you can spend limited administration efforts, e.g. for your mother's PC. Even though the unstable suite of the Debian system looks very stable for most of the times, there have been some package problems on the testing and unstable suite of the Debian system and a few of them were not so trivial to resolve. It may be quite painful for you. Sometimes, you may have a broken package or missing functionality for a few weeks. Running mostly stable release mixed with some packages from testing or unstable release is riskier than running pure unstable release for library version mismatch etc. If you really need the latest version of some programs under stable release, please use packages from buster-updates and (see Section 2.7.4, “Updates and Backports” ) services. These services must be used with extra care. This activity has been quite rigorous and reliable. Those for the testing archive may be fixed by the Debian testing security team. For several reasons, this activity is not as rigorous as that for stable and you may need to wait for the migration of fixed unstable packages. Those for the unstable archive are fixed by the individual maintainer. Actively maintained unstable packages are usually in a fairly good shape by leveraging latest upstream security fixes. See Debian security FAQ for how Debian handles security bugs. The main area provides the Debian system (see Section 2.1.5, “Debian is 100% free software” ). The word distribution is alternatively used as the synonym to the suite in many documentations.http://aspire-plus.com/bci/www/img/current-opening-in-manual-testing.xml

The relationship between the suite and the codename can be summarized as the following. This process makes the testing archive very current and usable. Then the new stable release is created by assigning the codename for the old testing archive to the new stable archive and creating the new codename for the new testing archive. The initial contents of the new testing archive is exactly the same as that of the newly released stable archive. For this transition period, both unstable and testing archives are not good for most people. Your system is difficult to keep in good working condition with the unstable archive since it suffers surges of major upgrades for core packages. The testing archive is not useful either since it contains mostly the same content as the stable archive without its security support ( Debian testing-security-announce 2008-12 ). After a month or so, the unstable archive may be usable if you are careful. We will place their interests first in our priorities. We will support the needs of our users for operation in many different kinds of computing environments. We will not object to non-free works that are intended to be used on Debian systems, or attempt to charge a fee to people who create or use such works. We will allow others to create distributions containing both the Debian system and other works, without any fee from us. In furtherance of these goals, we will provide an integrated system of high-quality materials with no legal restrictions that would prevent such uses of the system.The packages in these areas are not part of the Debian system, although they have been configured for use with Debian. We encourage CD manufacturers to read the licenses of the packages in these areas and determine if they can distribute the packages on their CDs. Thus, although non-free works are not a part of Debian, we support their use and provide infrastructure for non-free packages (such as our bug tracking system and mailing lists).

This makes Debian's free software standards very strict ones. Those packages have restored their original names with the release of Debian Stretch (Debian 9) after those problems get solved. Enabling access to the non-free and contrib areas does not obscure the source of packages. Interactive full screen use of aptitude (8) provides you with full visibility and control over what packages are installed from which area to keep your system as free as you wish. Here is a bit over simplified definition for them. Most users would not want the package unless all of the packages listed in this field are installed.Many users of this package may benefit from installing packages listed in this field but can have reasonable functions without them.Generally the resolution is to upgrade all of the packages listed in this field.All of the packages listed in this field must be removed to install this package.If you set shell as Section 1.4.2, “Customizing bash”, type the following. Don't panic.It consumes less memory and runs faster.It is basically a wrapper of apt-get, apt-cache and similar commands, originally intended as an end-user interface and enables some options better suited for interactive usage by default. It consumes more memory and runs slower.Password: See Section 9.2.10, “Recording changes in configuration files” for easier way. Only regex matched packages under the heading are marked to be purged by this.This provides you a chance to remove garbages collected and exposes you to the best combination of latest packages. Of course, you should make a full backup of system to a safe place (see Section 10.2, “Backup and recovery” ) before doing this. I recommend to make a dual boot configuration using different partition to have the smoothest transition. The larger the difference of the upgrade, the more likely you face larger troubles.

For the transition from the old stable to the new stable after its release, you can read its new Release Notes and follow the exact procedure described in it to minimize troubles. The difference between stable and testing could have grown quite large after the previous stable release and makes upgrade situation complicated. Using them without fully understanding their effects may break your whole system. It is only good for checking local modifications by the administrator or damage due to media errors. This makes the system more prone to be hit by the critical package bugs. But this overlooks files created by the maintainer scripts. This makes you search words mentioned in package scripts and installation query texts. This should help you to create your own solution to some package problems. Label: Debian. Suite: unstable. Codename: sid. Date: Sat, 14 May 2011 08:20:50 UTC. Valid-Until: Sat, 21 May 2011 08:20:50 UTC. Architectures: alpha amd64 armel hppa hurd-i386 i386 ia64 kfreebsd-amd64 kfreebsd-i386 mips mipsel powerpc s390 sparc. Components: main contrib non-free. Description: Debian x.y Unstable - Not Released. MD5Sum:Origin: Debian. Label: Debian. Component: main. Architecture: amd64 Origin: Debian. NotAutomatic: yes. Architecture: amd64 See more on dpkg-source (1). An udeb package is a stripped down deb package which removes few non-essential contents such as documentation to save space while relaxing the package policy requirements. Both deb and udeb packages share the same package structure.This is very powerful and needs to be used with care. The udpkg command is a stripped down version of the dpkg command. For example, you can make the vi command select to run vim while installing both vim and nvi packages. The use of dpkg-divert is meant for the package maintenance scripts. Its casual use by the system administrator is deprecated. You have been warned! If it is stable under a newly created user account, this hypothesis is confirmed.

(This is a bug of packaging and usually avoided by the packager.) You may need to read old configuration file contents to recover configuration information later. (Do not erase them too quickly.) When you install a package with overlapped files using aptitude (8) or apt-get (1) under such a situation, dpkg (1) which unpacks package ensures to return error to the calling program without overwriting existing files. The dpkg (1) command only protects against overwriting by the unpacking. When a package contains bugs in its removal scripts, the package may become impossible to remove and quite nasty. Let's assume foo package was broken and needs to be replaced. See dpkg (8) for details. This is less time consuming and produces better results in the end. You must make your own decision what to do with them. If package incompatibility exists, you may break system. You must be able to judge these technical requirements. The use of mixed source of random archives is completely optional operation and its use is not something I encourage you to use. You should still check ABI compatibility issues etc. for them. This is true even if you use apt-pinning (see Section 2.7.3, “Tweaking candidate version” ). You should consider chroot or similar techniques (see Section 9.10, “Virtualized system” ) to run programs from different archives. You must avoid using apt-pinning except when you absolutely need it. The apt-pinning is completely optional operation and its use is not something I encourage you to use. For example, Ubuntu and Debian are not meant to be mixed. If the Pin-Priority of the package is larger than 1000, this version restriction for upgrading is dropped to enable downgrading (see Section 2.7.10, “Emergency downgrading” ). Pin-Priority: -1. Package. Pin-Priority: -1 Pin-Priority: 100 Pin-Priority: 700. Pin-Priority: 700 Pin-Priority: 700. Package: debian-reference-common.

Pin-Priority: 700 Documentation packages have been always safe to install from unstable archive in my experience, so far. If the risk of breaking an existing stable system by the automatic upgrade is smaller than that of the system broken by the intruder using its security hole which has been closed by the security update, you should consider using this automatic upgrade with configuration parameters as the following. Even for such unstable case, you may still want to download packages in advance to save time for the interactive upgrade with configuration parameters as the following. It should be done only as a part of emergency recovery process. Despite of this situation, it is known to work well in many incidents. For critical systems, you should backup all important data on the system after the recovery operation and re-install the new system from the scratch. Pin-Priority: 1010 Linux kernel, bootloader, udev, PAM, APT, and networking related packages and their configuration files require special attention. Priority: optional. Section: admin. Description: Circumventing Debian package dependenciesThis avoids massive package upgrades due to their dependencies. You should check BTS before using them. On the other hand, generic web (http) proxy servers are more robust and easier to cope with such changes. There are several repository management tools available. A comprehensive list is available online. If you want to use a package from another Linux distribution than the one you have installed on your system, you can use alien to convert it from your preferred package format and install it.Practically, alien (1) should only be used for non-free binary-only packages which are LSB compliant or statically linked. For free softwares, you should use their source packages to make real Debian packages.

Debian Users' Manuals Web interface: VCS interface: git clone Active work is being done for the currentHelp is welcome, especially with non-x86Web interface: VCS interface: git clone Problems and patches should be reported asWeb interface: VCS interface: git clone Web interface: VCS interface: git clone Web interface: VCS interface: git clone Basic tutorials, tips, andWeb interface: VCS interface: git clone The document includesSome of its content might not be fully up-to-date.Web interface: VCS interface: git clone Web interface: VCS interface: git clone Web interface: VCS interface: git clone Web interface: VCS interface: git clone Web interface: VCS interface: git clone Web interface: VCS interface: git clone. Typically they will consist ofUse the full-upgrade In addition toThe following NEW packages will be installed:Need to get 3200kB of archives. After unpacking 8413kB will be used.Size changes will be shown. The following NEW packages will be automatically installed:The following NEW packages will be installed:Need to get 3200kB of archives. After unpacking 8413kB will be used.The following NEW packages will be installed:Need to get 3200kB of archives. After unpacking 8413kB will be used. The following packages will be REMOVED:Install the following packages. Score is 41The following actions will resolve these dependencies. Install the following packages. Score is 19You can solve them yourself by hand or type 'n' to quit. The following packages have unmet dependencies:Abort. The size of aPlacing a question markThis format code will beWhen a package isThe grouping policyYou can set theThis is the grouping that isThis is theEach version ofFor instance:For instance, ifHowever, itPlacing a tilde characterFor instance,Customizing aptitude Customizing keybindings.

Actions may beIf an action is notThe followingThis will prevent aptitude from automatically upgrading to this version, but will allowBy default, aptitude will select the version to which the package would normally be upgraded; you may override thisIf you decide you really want the forbiddenUse the dist-upgrade command to upgradeThis command is less conservative thanUsers are advised to either use upgrade instead or to carefully inspect the list ofAll packages which match any of the given patterns will be displayed; forThe first character of each line indicates the current state of the package: the most common states areThe second character indicates the stored actionIf the thirdIf either of these is present, then only the version youIf the verbosity levelThis allows you to prevent a cache from growing out of control over time without completelyYou can select a particular version of aYou can select a particular version of a package by appendingNote that while all options will be accepted for all commands, someBy default, the package cache is stored inIdentical to the help action.This does not require root privileges. In theYou can execute scheduled actions byThis is equivalent to making the corresponding selections in visual mode, then exiting the program normally.This may be supplied multiple times to make the program quieter, but unlikeThis may be supplied multiple times to get more and more information.In particular, suppresses the prompt that appears when installing, upgrading,This option overrides -P.You cannot use this option and -i at the same time.You cannot use this option andOtherwise, it will store them inIf TMPDIR is not set, then TMP will be. Actions may be performed from a visual interface or from the command-line.If an action is not specified on the command-line,The packages should be listed after theFor example,The following override specifiers are available:Once you enterTherefore, if you issue (e.g.

) the commandPackages are specified in exactly the same way as for theThis will prevent aptitude from automatically upgrading to this version, but will allow automatic upgrades to future versions. By default, aptitude will select the version to which the package would normally be upgraded; you may override this selection by appendingIf you decide you really want the forbidden version after all, theInstalled packages will not be removed unless they are unused (see the sectionThis command is less conservative thanHowever, it is capable of upgrading packages thatThis command was originally namedAll packages which match any of the given patterns will be displayed; for instance,The first character of each line indicates the current state of the package: the most common states areThe second character indicates the stored action (if any; otherwise a blank space is displayed) to be performed on the package, with the most common actions beingIf the third character isOtherwise, information about theIf the verbosity level is 2 or greater, the select version or versions will be displayed once for each archive in which they are found.It displays a sequence of dependencies leading to the target package, along with a note indicating the installed state of each package in the dependency chain:Note that the dependency that aptitude produced in this case is only a suggestion. This is because no package installed on my computer depends on or recommends theFor instance, if A requires B, C requires D, and B and C conflict,These rules are progressively weakened until a match is found.If the verbosity level is 2 or more, a truly excessive amount of debugging information will be printed to standard output.This allows you to prevent a cache from growing out of control over time without completely emptying it.Note that while all options will be accepted for all commands, some options don't apply to particular commands and will be ignored by those commands.

By default, the package cache is stored inIdentical to theThis is equivalent to passingThis does not requireYou can execute scheduled actions by runningFor instance,For the command-line actionsFor instance, passingThis may be supplied multiple times to make the program quieter, but unlikeThis may be supplied multiple times to get more and more information.Prompts forThis option overridesYou cannot use this option andOtherwise, it will store them inSee the GNU General Public License for more details. Both the interactive interface and the command line include powerful filters and search patterning. In the CLI, the command is search followed by the search string. In both cases, aptitude lets you input not only parts of the package name and regular expressions, but also special search patterns.Use L to filter the text lists, where you get a search input box for entering a pattern, as in a search. You can accurately find each package, even if the spelling isn't exactly right. Our example can have an undesirable side effect: It targets LibreOffice but picks up packages with header files (whose names typically are lib -dev ) and removes them, which was not what we wanted. A more precise filtering is using the section name instead of the package name as the pattern. Specific exceptions (e.g., libraries that end up in a system because of a dependency) can be dealt with through corrections to actions (see Table 3). When not used correctly, the action can lead to losing possibly required data. Thus, a setting for packages for the Debian MySQL server can determine whether the system should delete databases during a purge. In any case, a second look before executing the command is advised. Aptitude proves to be much more complex and provides quite a few more options for managing packages. Of course, this also has its downside. The program uses considerably more time to start and end than apt-get.

At startup, it reads its additional database to determine status and, when it closes, it saves it back to the hard disk. Conclusion If you want fine-grained yet efficient control of the packages you use, the mighty aptitude provides far and away more options than apt-get. However, it requires a bit more knowledge and a steeping learning curve, whereas apt-get gets a start right out of the gate. Once you have learned to appreciate aptitude's text mode interface with all its options for previewing and filtering, must always remember to call aptitude keep-all before each run, to remove all reservations. If you're writing installation instructions for an Ubuntu package or article, you should make sure you always use apt-get in all your examples. Apt-get provides the basic functionalities and it's best to let the users decide whether to use apt-get or aptitude. As an author, you can't possibly anticipate what side effects could occur with aptitude. He has assumed the role of mentor, guinea pig, and package sponsor since the restructuring of the aptitude team. Frank Hofmann ( ) works in Berlin as a service provider for typesetting and printing. Since 2008, he's been coordinating the regional meetings of the Linux User Group for the Berlin-Brandenburg region. Which one works best for you. It is based on a library which contains the core application, and apt-get is the first front end — command-line based — which was developed within the project.The APT developers reserve the right to change the public interface of this tool to further improve it. On the opposite, the public interface of apt-get is well defined and will not change in any backwards incompatible way. It is thus the tool that you want to use when you need to script package installation requests.The most recommended interface, apt, is the one that we will use in the examples given in this section. Note, however, that apt-get and aptitude have a very similar command line syntax.

When there are major differences between these three commands, these will be detailed.Depending on the speed of your connection and configuration, the operation can take a while, since it involves downloading a certain number of (usually compressed) files ( Packages, Sources, Translation- language-code ), which have gradually become bigger and bigger as Debian has developed (at least 10 MB of data for the main section).However, even after a xz compression, these files can remain rather large (the Packages.xz for the main section of Buster takes more than 7 MB). If you wish to update regularly, these downloads can take up a lot of time.To achieve this, official Debian mirrors distribute different files which list the differences between one version of the Packages file and the following version. They are generated at each update of the archives and a history of one week is kept. Each of these “diff” files only takes a few dozen kilobytes for Unstable, so that the amount of data downloaded by a weekly apt update is often divided by 10. For Stable and Testing, which change less, the gain is even more noticeable.This can also be interesting when network access is very fast but when the processor of the machine to upgrade is rather slow, since the time saved on the download is more than lost when the computer calculates the new versions of these files (starting with the older versions and applying the downloaded differences). To do that, you can use the APT configuration parameter Acquire::PDiffs and set it to false. Acquire::Languages can limit or disable the download of Translation- language-code files and save even more time. For a complete reference see apt.conf (5).In both cases, APT will automatically install the necessary dependencies or delete the packages which depend on the package that is being removed. The apt purge package command involves a complete uninstallation by deleting the configuration files as well.This can be done quite easily.

Next, transfer the pkg-list file onto the computers you want to update and use the following commands:Then dpkg --set-selections restores the selection of packages that you wish to install, and the apt-get invocation executes the required operations.With an apt install command, add “ - ” to the names of the packages you wish to remove.In general, the dependency solver will use that information as a hint to look for alternative solutions.The easiest way to retrieve these files is to reinstall the affected package. Unfortunately, the packaging system finds that the latter is already installed and politely refuses to reinstall it; to avoid this, use the --reinstall option of the apt and apt-get commands. The following command reinstalls postfix even if it is already present:But as you have learned in Section 5.2.3, “Checksums, List of Configuration Files” (see also sidebar GOING FURTHER Force dpkg to ask configuration file questions ), you can use the following command to be asked to install the unmodified version and even restore any deleted configuration file as well. Instead they create it during installation by either copying a skeleton or writing it by a script. In such cases the commands shown above won't work.With this command, it is possible to go back to an older version of a package (if, for instance, you know that it works well), provided that it is still available in one of the sources referenced by the sources.list file. Otherwise the snapshot.debian.org archive can come to the rescue (see sidebar GOING FURTHER Old package versions: snapshot.debian.org ).In case of frequent updates, this directory can quickly take a lot of disk space with several versions of each package; you should regularly sort through them.

Two commands can be used: apt-get clean entirely empties the directory; apt-get autoclean only removes packages which can no longer be downloaded (because they have disappeared from the Debian mirror) and are therefore clearly useless (the configuration parameter APT::Clean-Installed can prevent the removal of.deb files that are currently installed).To upgrade, use apt upgrade, apt-get upgrade or aptitude safe-upgrade (of course after apt update ). This command looks for installed packages which can be upgraded without removing any packages. In other words, the goal is to ensure the least intrusive upgrade possible.If you specified Testing or Unstable in your sources.list, apt upgrade will switch most of your Stable system to Testing or Unstable, which might not be what you intended.With this instruction, apt will complete the upgrade even if it has to remove some obsolete packages or install new dependencies. This is also the command used by users who work daily with the Debian Unstable release and follow its evolution day by day. It is so simple that it hardly needs explanation: APT's reputation is based on this great functionality.Instead, you should use apt-get dist-upgrade (”distribution upgrade”), the historical and well-known command that apt and aptitude also accept for the convenience of users who got used to it.Each directory represents a configuration file which is split over multiple files. APT includes them in alphabetical order, so that the last ones can modify a configuration element defined in one of the first ones.Indeed, the administrator can easily modify the configuration of the software by adding a ready-made file in the directory in question without having to change an existing file. Package maintainers use the same approach when they need to adapt the configuration of another software to ensure that it perfectly co-exists with theirs.