Debian

Both aptitude and dselect provide a basic, interactive interface as well. You can navigate through a list of available packages, classified according to sections, or you can search for packages using a number of criteria. The interface is based on the simple curses library, and can seem cumbersome at times, although it is an improvement over the command line utilities mentioned previously. One advantage of these interfaces (as well as the command line utilities) is that they can be used in a terminal environment and do not require a graphic desktop environment be installed.

This is the simplest and fastest method to install one or a few packages and their dependencies, but it requires that you know what packages you want to install. There are several utilities that can be used to search package names and descriptions, which will provide you with the means to find the proper package names. The most common of these is apt-cache. Once you know what package or packages you want to install, you can use apt-get or the command line format of aptitude or dselect to quickly download and install the packages.

The package information is updated simply by the refresh menu entry in Synaptic, or the aptitude or apt-get update command to update the package information cache. This should be done regularly to ensure that the information you have on available packages is current. Once you have the repositories configured and have updated the package information cache, you can select and install software from any or all of them as desired. There are two basic methods for selecting packages. command line and selection lists.

Once you have the repositories that you want configured, you need to retrieve information about what is in the repositories. This includes not only package lists, but package descriptions, contents, and dependencies. This is done by updating your package cache, after which you can browse, select, install, upgrade, and delete packages.

One of the more subtle changes often made, other than adding non-Debian repositories, has very important implications. Note that the release name in most of the lines from the previous Debian release sources . list is wheezy. This means that the packages available through the package managers will always be from the Debian 7 release. Some administrators change the release name to stable. This has both advantages and disadvantages.

All of the configuration for media or repositories resides in /etc/apt, in a file called sources . list and any files in /etc/apt/sources .list.dwith a .list extension. These files can be modified manually using your preferred editor, manipulated by various API utilities such as apt-add-repository or apt-spy, or via a menu item in the Synaptic Gill. Details on how each method works are available in various man pages, such as those for sources . list, apt-add-repository and apt-spy, and so on, or in the help files for Synaptic.

Debian software is grouped together in a release. All of the software in a release is available as a set of purchased or downloaded media (CDs, DVDs, or new with Debian 7, Blue-ray Discs), or as individual packages grouped in an online repository. While dpkg works only on packages already downloaded (or on media mounted locally), the other package management utilities understand offline media, and local and remote repositories, which must be configured.

Synaptic is a package manager with a complete GUI interface and no command line capability. Itoffers most of the capabilities of aptitude along with many of the repository handling features of dseleet. Uke the menu-based dselect and aptitude utilities, it provides a software list divided into sections of interest, such as databases, development, editors, and many more, which allow an administrator to browse available software more effectively. It also has search functions which allow easy discovery of packages for specific purposes.

Best practices are as follows:

aptitude is a frontend for the APT suite of tools, with added functions that make it a little more like dselect, where it offers finer-grained dependency checking, and resolves dependencies with user assistance rather than autonomously. As such, itis sometimes more successful than dselect or apt-get in resolving dependencies in ways that require fewer major software changes. Uke dselect, it is menu-driven (using the curses interface), with command line functions as well.

The Advanced Package Tool (APT) was developed to provide a better command line tool, that provides the download and dependency resolution of dselect without requiring a separate utility for installation. Think of it as an all-in-one command line tool that can select and install or remove packages, and automatically resolve dependencies.