System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager is the common way to install software, but for the dyed-in-the-wool geek, it has to be done by the command line.

I’ve been careful not to dirty my Dell Dimension E520, aka delin, with every package under the sun, preferring to keep it pristine and do the dirty work on the ThinkPad. Today, I went to install VirtualBox to give me some spaces to play in.

apt-get is old faithful, but years ago, I started using aptitude because of its ability to clean up related software (dependencies) when you remove software (package).

Doing some research now, I see that apt-get has had equivalent functionality since Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), with the command sudo apt-get autoremove [application name].

So now, I have to break myself of the aptitude habit. I would sudo apt-get autoremove aptitude , but like it seems to be part of ubuntu-minimal — why?

Thursday, April 3rd Update: Thank you AmyRose! She explained that the default behavior of aptitude is to install “recommended packages”. I can see why this would be desirably by many people, but also why for many people such as myself this is very awkward default behavior. Why would the source code by a recommend package for Virtual Box? I would dislike to try and add a single KDE application and next thing I know am running Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu.

What are the advantages of aptitude today?


$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose
The following extra packages will be installed:
libqt3-mt libxalan110 libxerces27 virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.22-14-generic
Suggested packages:
libqt3-mt-psql libqt3-mt-mysql libqt3-mt-odbc xalan
Recommended packages:
virtualbox-ose-source
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libqt3-mt libxalan110 libxerces27 virtualbox-ose
virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.22-14-generic
0 upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.