The Ubuntu command line tool to install software aptitude wants to install a bunch of additional packages that aren’t required according to apt-get.
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]1.
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 aptitude install virtualbox-ose
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Writing extended state information... Done
Building tag database... Done
The following NEW packages will be automatically installed:
debhelper dpatch dpkg-dev fakeroot gettext html2text intltool-debian
kbuild libcompress-raw-zlib-perl libcompress-zlib-perl
libio-compress-base-perl libio-compress-zlib-perl libmail-sendmail-perl
libqt3-mt libxalan110 libxerces27 module-assistant patch patchutils
po-debconf virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.22-14-generic virtualbox-ose-source
The following NEW packages will be installed:
debhelper dpatch dpkg-dev fakeroot gettext html2text intltool-debian
kbuild libcompress-raw-zlib-perl libcompress-zlib-perl
libio-compress-base-perl libio-compress-zlib-perl libmail-sendmail-perl
libqt3-mt libxalan110 libxerces27 module-assistant patch patchutils
po-debconf virtualbox-ose virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.22-14-generic
virtualbox-ose-source
0 packages upgraded, 23 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
$ 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.
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6 Comments
I always stay old-school so I stick with apt-get install.
From my experience, Ubuntu is a PITA period. I just upgraded to 7.10, hoping it would be decent after my hatred of 7.04, but it seems to be even worse. Yep, next upgrade, it’s back to the RPM-based distros.
That said, I’m a geek too. I always use the command-line, for that sort of thing. Perhaps for more reason than anything because I just use a simple window manager and stay away from GNOME.
Thanks for the comment Keith. I really enjoy Ubuntu and GNOME actually. For all its faults I’ve never used a finer linux.
I’m back to XP after some Ubuntu issues (mainly the fact that 1) DVD playback was always sketchy, 2) my sound levels and quality were wonky, which for a mediaphile isn’t good and 3) I couldn’t play my games properly), but I agree with you 100%. Ubuntu is the way to go. As is command line installs. It makes me always feel, for lack of a better word, capable.
sudo apt-get install beer always yields humorous results on differing campus computers here. We tried to name one of our IM teams “sudo apt-get goal” but most of the team didn’t get it, which was a shame because I had a killer logo for our jerseys
This is because aptitude installs recommended packages by default. Just type “sudo aptitude” without any further parameters and go to the dependency settings window and turn off the installation of recommended packages. Or, if you’re using Hardy’s aptitude, it will be under the settings window somewhere.
Hope this helps.
I’m generally a fan of apt-get for package installation. I am, however, strongly biased toward Debian-based distros mainly because of aptitude and such large and well-maintained repositories. After doing some rather stupid things that generally broke my Debian Etch desktop, aptitude saved the day. Some good time with aptitude fixed all the broken packages and left me in a better state than before since it cleaned up a mess left over from a proprietary NVIDIA driver, leaving a clean slate for a fresh NVIDIA driver install.
I started my journey with RHEL 5. I wiped my system in favor of Debian as I found yum to be slow and aggravating. I always found myself searching and resolving dependencies based on yum failures. Many times these dependencies were not in RHEL’s repos, so I had to start adding other repos….so once I started adding repositories from other sources it took packages backward in time and broke my system. Recovering from that was not as graceful as aptitude; in fact, it was not graceful at all. My system was so broken I couldn’t even remove packages. At the time I wiped RHEL, I had 200 + updates that were unable to install. With RHEL, it’s their way or not at all, I gathered.
I’m sorry if my bad experience with RHEL inflames some of the rpm-based distro lovers, but so far my experience is rpm=closed, rpm=rigid, rpm=unreliable. I disliked SuSE for the same reason (although SuSE repositories are better than RHEL). I have not yet tried Fedora, and perhaps FC offers more packages and better compatibility with 3rd party repositories.
Some of the problems listed above with Ubuntu hardware support and DVD playback don’t ring true with me. I set up a Sony Vaio recently with Xubuntu. It detected and installed drivers for the wireless, touch pad, hibernate and video without issue. On my Debian boxes and the Ubuntu box I have deployed elsewhere, DVD playback has been great with Xine and Mplayer. The only time it’s “sketchy” is when the DVD is scratched. Then it’s not an issue with the operating system. Totem has given me trouble before.