The downloadable version of this article is available here:
http://techrepublic.com.com/5138-10877-6042158.html
Do you use a package manager when installing Linux or do you prefer the command line interface?
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I liked reading the downloaded article. Jaqui even managed to spell words correctly. I only noticed one grammatical error. (Drakx, Installing Updates, the first line, the word "called" should not start with an upper case "c".) Nevertheless I'm sure that your English teachers would be amazed (at how well a spelling checker can work). 
I'm going to have to try Synaptic on Debian. I totally hate apt. According to your article Synaptic is a GTK application, which means that I will have to install Gnome on my Debian system. That's ok. I hate it when the Debian update-rc utility makes all of the run levels from 3 - 5 act the same and I have to go in and remove links in run level 3. I like using run level 3 because if I mess up an X application I can shut down the X software without rebooting the computer.
Unfortunately you stopped in the middle. Where is slapt-get, emerge, and YaST2?
Anyway, in summary, the article does a good job of describing the package managers that it covers, apparently Jaqui has a good spell checker, but I wish that the article had included more of the package managers used on other popular Linux distributions.
I'm going to have to try Synaptic on Debian. I totally hate apt. According to your article Synaptic is a GTK application, which means that I will have to install Gnome on my Debian system. That's ok. I hate it when the Debian update-rc utility makes all of the run levels from 3 - 5 act the same and I have to go in and remove links in run level 3. I like using run level 3 because if I mess up an X application I can shut down the X software without rebooting the computer.
Unfortunately you stopped in the middle. Where is slapt-get, emerge, and YaST2?
Anyway, in summary, the article does a good job of describing the package managers that it covers, apparently Jaqui has a good spell checker, but I wish that the article had included more of the package managers used on other popular Linux distributions.
I figured a three page article was a good start, and the two covered works for most people, since .deb and .rpm are the best known / most used package formats.
I can't cover YaST2, since SuSE locks up on boot...
oh, hold it, a cover dvd of SuSE did boot..tossed an error during install but it did boot.
I personally have never run across slapt-get or emerge, which distros use them?
[ more learning to do. ]
I can't cover YaST2, since SuSE locks up on boot...
oh, hold it, a cover dvd of SuSE did boot..tossed an error during install but it did boot.
I personally have never run across slapt-get or emerge, which distros use them?
[ more learning to do.
]
Slapt-get is available for Slackware. Emerge is used on Gentoo. I haven't used either yet but I've spent a lot of time reading their on line documentation. I've been considering installing one or both of these distros for quite a while now.
Gentoo refers to its software repository as its portage tree. There are a lot of interesting packages there so Gentoo will probably be my next experiment.
I'm really glad that I read your article. I really really hate the apt package manager in Debian. Hopefully the Synaptic package manager will be more my cup of tea. In other respects I like Debian well enough. It's nothing to fall in love with but it runs well. The fact that they don't have a new magor release every six months means that they don't need lots of patches. I like that.
The only problem that I have with SuSE is that they make a new magor release every six months or so. I got really angry when I had purchased v9.2 but didn't install it right away. They released v9.3 before I had installed v9.2. The only time that I had trouble installing SuSE was on my Toshiba Satellite notebook computer. The installation software got into an infinite loop during its startup trying to allocate memory. Otherwise I have never had trouble installing SuSE.
I just remembered. Red Hat has the yum package manager. I haven't used it. I don't care for Red Hat.
Gentoo refers to its software repository as its portage tree. There are a lot of interesting packages there so Gentoo will probably be my next experiment.
I'm really glad that I read your article. I really really hate the apt package manager in Debian. Hopefully the Synaptic package manager will be more my cup of tea. In other respects I like Debian well enough. It's nothing to fall in love with but it runs well. The fact that they don't have a new magor release every six months means that they don't need lots of patches. I like that.
The only problem that I have with SuSE is that they make a new magor release every six months or so. I got really angry when I had purchased v9.2 but didn't install it right away. They released v9.3 before I had installed v9.2. The only time that I had trouble installing SuSE was on my Toshiba Satellite notebook computer. The installation software got into an infinite loop during its startup trying to allocate memory. Otherwise I have never had trouble installing SuSE.
I just remembered. Red Hat has the yum package manager. I haven't used it. I don't care for Red Hat.
has, until this dvd, locked the system completely when it reaches the point of loading the adaptec scsi controller.
my bios is not scsi friendly.
hmm, I have slak here on cd..I've not noticed a package manager, I'll have to start digging into it more.
my bios is not scsi friendly.
hmm, I have slak here on cd..I've not noticed a package manager, I'll have to start digging into it more.
The official Slackware "package manager" is pkgtool. It's a very rudimentary package manager, though it does provide both CLI and console captive interface (curses-based, I think) functionality.
The RedHat Package Manager (RPM) is the package management system on RedHat distros, its .rpm files are analogous to the Debian .deb files, and from what little work I have done in debian based distros rpm (the application) works very similar to dpkg on Debian.
In the latest RedHat distros there are three ways to download and install RPM files. Well actually there are 4 if you count downloading an RPM file by hand and installing it manually with RPM.
The first, and RedHat preferred tool is Up2Date, personally I don't use Up2Date for much beyond keeping my distro updated with the latest patches, or upgrading to the latest distro with the --upgrade switch.
YUM was a tool ported over from Yellow Dog linux (Yellow dog Update Manager), and is frequently the preferred tool for updating and installing apps in Fedora Core, and is installed on the latest Enterprise. YUM has a slightly different usage than APT. For example there is no update command nessecary before accessing the repositories, the default behavior is to update it's local cache each time you run it. But that is the drawback as well, fortunatly there is a -C switch that turns off the cache update.
The third and final tool is APT, yes this lowly, and from the look of previous posts, much maligned, application has been ported to redhat. Actually the aforementioned Up2Date is just a front-end that uses both APT and YUM to access repositories.
Synaptic is also available for RedHat as well, and from what I understand it is just a GUI for APT. From what I have heard there is a GUI front-end for YUM in the works (or out for all I know) as well.
So to wrap up, dpkg (.deb) rpm (.rpm) are technically the package managers, APT, YUM, Up2Date and URPMI (Universal RPM Installer, I believe), are tools for accessing online repositories of RPM and DEB files and handling their dependencies.
Please allow me to add, excellent article.
In the latest RedHat distros there are three ways to download and install RPM files. Well actually there are 4 if you count downloading an RPM file by hand and installing it manually with RPM.
The first, and RedHat preferred tool is Up2Date, personally I don't use Up2Date for much beyond keeping my distro updated with the latest patches, or upgrading to the latest distro with the --upgrade switch.
YUM was a tool ported over from Yellow Dog linux (Yellow dog Update Manager), and is frequently the preferred tool for updating and installing apps in Fedora Core, and is installed on the latest Enterprise. YUM has a slightly different usage than APT. For example there is no update command nessecary before accessing the repositories, the default behavior is to update it's local cache each time you run it. But that is the drawback as well, fortunatly there is a -C switch that turns off the cache update.
The third and final tool is APT, yes this lowly, and from the look of previous posts, much maligned, application has been ported to redhat. Actually the aforementioned Up2Date is just a front-end that uses both APT and YUM to access repositories.
Synaptic is also available for RedHat as well, and from what I understand it is just a GUI for APT. From what I have heard there is a GUI front-end for YUM in the works (or out for all I know) as well.
So to wrap up, dpkg (.deb) rpm (.rpm) are technically the package managers, APT, YUM, Up2Date and URPMI (Universal RPM Installer, I believe), are tools for accessing online repositories of RPM and DEB files and handling their dependencies.
Please allow me to add, excellent article.
The advanced package tool (apt) is awesome. Ignore those detractors: forgive them father for they know not what they do.
Synaptic and Aptitude are both front ends for apt, which is in turn a front end for dpkg. I don't much like the default behaviors of Aptitude, and I find GUIs too limiting for package management. YUM's defaults are very similar to Aptitude's, but worse, so I obviously don't like it much. Worse than YUM, of course, is urpmi -- it drives me up the friggin' wall.
The apt-rpm tool used by Fedora is pretty nice, but it had to be monkeyed around a little bit to work with RPMs. As a result, I find it falls just barely short of the native apt on Debian systems.
You're right about the rpm and dpkg commands being similar in what they do, though the syntax tends to be quite different.
Synaptic and Aptitude are both front ends for apt, which is in turn a front end for dpkg. I don't much like the default behaviors of Aptitude, and I find GUIs too limiting for package management. YUM's defaults are very similar to Aptitude's, but worse, so I obviously don't like it much. Worse than YUM, of course, is urpmi -- it drives me up the friggin' wall.
The apt-rpm tool used by Fedora is pretty nice, but it had to be monkeyed around a little bit to work with RPMs. As a result, I find it falls just barely short of the native apt on Debian systems.
You're right about the rpm and dpkg commands being similar in what they do, though the syntax tends to be quite different.
You refer to apt-get as requiring you to know package names without indicating that apt-cache can be used to find package names. What's up with that?
apt --help list apt-cache? [ it should, as it is a switch for apt ]
I never saw apt-cache in the help listing.
I knew it was there, as an option, but it doesn't appear in the easily accessed docuementation.
manpages are a major pain to read, so I never checked the man page for apt.
I never saw apt-cache in the help listing.
I knew it was there, as an option, but it doesn't appear in the easily accessed docuementation.
manpages are a major pain to read, so I never checked the man page for apt.
There is no apt --help command, unless you're talking about apt-rpm, in which case I have no idea if there's some weird apt --help tacked onto the apt system there.
A quick and easy way to see what's available on a given subject in Debian is to check the "see also" section at the bottom of the man page for something related to that subject. For instance, the "see also" section of man apt-get lists the following:
SEE ALSO
apt-cache(8), apt-cdrom(8), dpkg(8), dselect(8), sources.list(5), apt.conf(5), apt-config(8), The APT User's guide in /usr/share/doc/apt/, apt_preferences(5), the APT Howto.
Then, of course, apt-cache help works just like apt-get help, but for apt-cache instead.
A quick and easy way to see what's available on a given subject in Debian is to check the "see also" section at the bottom of the man page for something related to that subject. For instance, the "see also" section of man apt-get lists the following:
SEE ALSO
apt-cache(8), apt-cdrom(8), dpkg(8), dselect(8), sources.list(5), apt.conf(5), apt-config(8), The APT User's guide in /usr/share/doc/apt/, apt_preferences(5), the APT Howto.
Then, of course, apt-cache help works just like apt-get help, but for apt-cache instead.
I used to get into package dependency hell every few months once we had to move to Red Hat from Mandrake, and still do with the enterprise version, but in FC4 I added yum one day after wasting an hour trying to find an older library file to run nxserver have never looked back.
Though I did go through 6 installs of FC4 one week, and had to do the first set of updates 30 packages at a time, as asking for them all at once always crashed the machine.
Though I did go through 6 installs of FC4 one week, and had to do the first set of updates 30 packages at a time, as asking for them all at once always crashed the machine.
I really like the tools available with backtrack 3, but i'm new to linux. Is there a way to install all of those tools directly from BT3 to my SLAX machine? i've gone through the headache of trying to install BT3 on my HD, and would rather try something simpler. Thanks in advance.
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