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APT HOWTO

Abstract

This document intends to provide the user with a good understanding of the workings of the Debian package management utility, APT. Its goal is to make life easier for new Debian users and to help those who wish to deepen their understanding of the administration of this system. It was created for the Debian project in order to help improve the support available for users of this distribution.

Copyright Notice

Copyright © 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 Gustavo Noronha Silva

This manual is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.

This is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License is available as /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution or on the World Wide Web at the GNU General Public Licence. You can also obtain it by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

Contents

• 1 Introduction
  • 1.1 Basic terminology and concepts
• 2 Introduction to the Debian archive
  • 2.1 Introduction to Debian suites
  • 2.2 Debian sections
  • 2.3 APT's chain of trust
• 3 Basic Configuration
  • 3.1 The /etc/apt/sources.list file
  • 3.2 Authenticating packages
  • 3.3 Adding a CD-ROM to the sources.list file
  • 3.4 The APT configuration file
  • 3.5 Adjusting APT priority for packages
  • 3.6 Using APT through a proxy
• 4 Managing packages
  • 4.1 Using the Debian Package Manager: aptitude
  • 4.2 Updating the list of available packages
  • 4.3 Searching for packages
  • 4.4 Installing and reinstalling packages
  • 4.5 Installing manually downloaded or locally created debian packages
  • 4.6 Removing packages
  • 4.7 Upgrading packages
  • 4.8 Upgrading to a new release
  • 4.9 Keeping packages on hold
  • 4.10 Removing unused package files: clean and autoclean
• 5 Building from source
  • 5.1 Downloading source packages
  • 5.2 Packages needed for compiling a source package
  • 5.3 Building a debuging package
  • 5.4 Customizing package build options
  • 5.5 But hey, I do not want to use the Debian stuff!
• 6 Getting information about packages.
  • 6.1 Discovering package names
  • 6.2 Using dpkg to find package names
  • 6.3 How to discover to which package a file belongs
  • 6.4 Information about packages on the Web
• 7 Tricks and Techniques
  • 7.1 How to install packages "on demand"
  • 7.2 Caching packages
  • 7.3 Deciding which mirror is the best to include in the sources.list file: netselect, netselect-apt
  • 7.4 Removing unused locale files: localepurge
  • 7.5 How to keep informed about the changes in the packages.
• 8 Being at the other side: creating a repository
• 9 Alternative User Interfaces for managing packages
  • 9.1 Synaptic
  • 9.2 GNOME-APT
• 10 How to deal with errors
  • 10.1 Common errors
  • 10.2 Where can I find help?
• 11 What distributions support APT?
• 12 Credits
• 13 New versions of this tutorial

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APT HOWTO