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aptitude is also non-fattening, naturally cleansing, and housebroken. It does not, however, have Super Cow Powers, meaning that it does not implement the moo operation, verbosely or otherwise.

Run

aptitude

Use

After running it, use:

The common use of aptitude in TUI (text user interface) is; run aptitude; press 'u' (update the lists of available packages); press 'U' (Mark all upgradable packages to be upgraded); (search/select some stuff to install, is optional); press 'g' (to see the pending actions and modify if needed); press 'g' (again, to start the download).

Some time when you need to resolve conflicts, you discover that you made a mistake; you can easily use 'Cancel pending actions' in the 'Actions' menu so that you can re-select.

You can also use aptitude like in the same manner as apt-get:

Update the packages list:

aptitude update

Upgrade the packages:

aptitude upgrade

Install foo:

aptitude install foo

Remove bar:

aptitude remove bar

Purge foo:

aptitude purge foo

Personally, I still use apt-cache search foo to perform a search – aptitude search foo is slower. But you should try the aptitude search foo way. You should discover that the output is a bit different from apt-cache, in some case, it may be useful to search for a package to see if it is already installed.

The manual of aptitude is really a gold mine. I don't want to duplicate this useful informations so please take a look there for further help.

Package

aptitude

How to upgrade your distribution

Reading and following the instructions found in the release notes when upgrading to a new major release is strongly recommended. Once upon a time using 'dist-upgrade' as described below was feasible. It is no longer the recommended practice (unless you are running sid, in which case you should not need to be reading this.) Likewise dist-upgrade is not necessary for minor release upgrades (e.g. from lenny 5.0.1 to 5.0.2).

cat /etc/debian_version

Example for upgrading sarge to etch or etch 4.0r1 to 4.0r2 ...etc

aptitude update
aptitude dist-upgrade

apt-get to aptitude

Action

apt-get command

aptitude command

Install foo

apt-get install foo

aptitude install foo

Search foo

apt-cache search foo

aptitude search foo

Remove foo

apt-get remove foo

aptitude remove foo

List reverse dependencies

apt-cache rdepends foo

aptitude ~D foo

Print information on priorities for foo

apt-cache policy foo

aptitude versions foo

Download foo's sources and build a binary .deb package

apt-get source --compile foo

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See Also

and ... apt.conf, preferences, sources.list, Aptitude::Parse-Description-Bullets=true, AptitudeTodo