Installing Software on Debian (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

O'ReillyNet provides a primer on Aptitude, with a look at Synaptic. "Using APT is the most important skill for a Debian administrator to learn. The two most popular tools in Debian for managing packages are apt-get and aptitude. Most people find aptitude superior, as it not only includes all of apt-get's features, but also includes many others, such as an interactive menu-driven mode and the removal of packages when you no longer need them."

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Cool aptitude search patterns

Posted Apr 13, 2006 12:14 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

List installed packages that are not official Debian packages:
aptitude search '~S~i!~Odebian'

List packages installed from experimental:
aptitude search ~S~i~Aexperimental

List packages with 'ruby' and 'gtk' in their names:
aptitude search 'ruby gtk'
aptitude search ~nruby~ngtk

List installed packages that depend on bash:
aptitude search ~S~i~Dbash

Purge all packages that have been removed except for their config files:
aptitude purge ~c

For the full list of these patterns, install 'aptitude-doc' and see chapter 2, section 3 of the manual.

Not in Sarge

Posted Apr 16, 2006 19:07 UTC (Sun) by BackSeat (subscriber, #1886) [Link]

$ aptitude search '~S~i!~Odebian'
E: Unknown pattern type: S