Ubuntu Aptitude Tool
There’s the really cool tool I use to manage my Ubuntu machines that I would like to introduce you to, it’s call Aptitude and here’s an image of it…
This tool can in addition to working with the GUI (Graphical User Interface) can also be used from the terminal in the format sudo aptitude <do_something_useful> . Lets begin with the GUI;
To access the menu type Ctrl + t and you will the following result and then use your arrow keys to navigate and make a choice:
Also note the **letters** by the menu options, either you type that letter to get it to execute the menu option or you press the **return key**. And an entry like C-U means Ctrl + Shift + u . There are so many options to choose from, I leave you to try it out…
From the command line we can carry out several operation such as:
- Update — sudo aptitude update
- Upgrade — sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
- Install — sudo aptitude install package_name
See man aptitude for more action commands.
Now the advantages includes but not limited to:
- Takes care of dependencies
- Easy on beginners
- Nice UI
- Regex searches are available
Let me show a regex example:
aptitude search ‘?narrow(?installed, !?archive(stable))’
- That will search for installed packages from everything but stable
Similarity to other Ubuntu package commands:
Action apt-get command aptitude commandInstall foo apt-get install foo aptitude install fooSearch foo apt-cache search foo aptitude search fooRemove foo apt-get remove foo aptitude remove fooList reverse apt-cache rdepends foo aptitude search ~Dfoo
dependenciesPrint information apt-cache policy foo aptitude versions foo
on priorities for fooDownload foo's apt-get source --compile foo ?
sources and build
a binary .deb package
Conclusion
If you new to Ubuntu and Linux in general don’t fret use aptitude to help get thing installed.
