synaptic

20 Things to Learn About APT With the Free Chapter of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook

November 15, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

We just released a sample chapter of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook. It covers the APT family of tools: apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, update-manager, etc.

Click here to get your free sample chapter

I’m sure you will enjoy it. There are many interesting things to learn:

How to customize the sources.list file
The various APT repositories that Debian offers (Security Updates, Stable Updates, Proposed Updates, Backports, Experimental, etc.)
How to select the best Debian mirror for you
How to find old package versions
How to install the same selection of packages on multiple computers
How to install and remove a package on a single command-line
How to reinstall packages and how to install a specific version of a package
How to pass options to dpkg via APT
How to configure a proxy for APT
How to set priorities to various package sources (APT pinning)
How to safely mix packages from several distributions on a single system
How to use aptitude’s text-mode graphical interface
How to use the tracking of automatically installed packages to keep a clean system
How APT checks the authenticity of packages that it downloads
How to add supplementary GnuPG keys to APT’s trusted keyring
How to upgrade from one stable distribution to the next
How to handles problems after an upgrade
How to keep a system up-to-date
How to automate upgrades
How to find the package that you’re looking for

If you liked this chapter, click here to contribute a few euros towards the liberation of the whole book. That way you’ll get a copy of the ebook as soon as it’s available. Thank you!

I also invite you to share this sample chapter as widely as possible. We’re only at 40% of the liberation fund and there’s less than 2 weeks left. I hope this book extract will convince enough people that the book is going to be great, and that it really deserves to be liberated and bundled with Debian!

apt-get, aptitude, … pick the right Debian package manager for you

June 20, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

This is a frequently asked question: “What package manager shall I use?”. And my answer is “the one that suits your needs”. In my case, I even use different package managers depending on what I’m trying to do.

APT vs dpkg, which one is the package manager?

In the Debian world, we’re usually thinking of APT-based software when we’re referring to a “package manager”. But in truth, the real package manager is dpkg. It’s the low-level tool that takes a .deb file and extracts its content on the disk, or that takes the name of a package to remove the associated files, etc.

APT is better known because it’s the part of the packaging infrastructure that matters to the user. APT makes collection of software available to the user and does the dirty work of downloading all the required packages and installing them by calling dpkg in the correct order to respect the dependencies.

But APT is not a simple program, it’s a library and several different APT frontends have been developed on top of that library. The most widely known is apt-get since it’s the oldest one, and it’s provided by APT itself.

Graphical APT front-ends

update-manager is a simple frontend useful to install security updates and other trivial daily upgrades (if you’re using testing or sid). It’s the one that you get when you click in the desktop notification that tells you that updates are available. In cases, where the upgrade is too complicated for update-manager, it will suggest to run synaptic which is full featured package manager. You can browse the list on installed/available packages in numerous ways, you can mark packages for installation/upgrade/removal/purge and then run in one go all the recorded actions.

software-center aims to be an easy to use application installer, it will hide most of the packaging details and will only present installed/available applications (as defined by a .desktop file). It’s very user friendly and has been developed by Ubuntu.

Of the graphical front-ends, I use mainly synaptic and only when I’m reviewing what I have installed to trim the system down.

Console-based GUI APT front-ends

In this category, I’ll cite only aptitude. Run without parameter, it will start a powerful console-based GUI. Much like synaptic, you can have multiple views of the installed/available packages and mark packages for installation/upgrade/removal/purge before executing everything at once.

Command-line based package managers and APT front-ends

This is where the well known apt-get fits, but there are several other alternatives: aptitude, cupt, wajig. Wajig and cupt are special cases as they don’t use libapt: the former wraps several tools including apt-get, and the latter is a (partial) APT reimplementation (versions 1.x were in Perl, 2.x are now is C++).

You’re welcome to try them out and find out which one you prefer, but I have never felt the need to use something else than apt-get and aptitude.

apt-get or aptitude?

First I want to make it clear that you can use both and mix them without problems. It used to be annoying when apt-get did not track which packages were automatically installed while aptitude did, but now that both packages share this list, there’s no reason to avoid switching back and forth.

I would recommend apt-get for the big upgrades (i.e. dist-upgrade from one stable to the next) because it will always find quickly a relatively good solution while aptitude can find several convoluted solutions (or none) and it’s difficult to decide which one should be used.

On the opposite for regular upgrades in unstable (or testing), I would recommend “aptitude safe-upgrade“. It does a better job than apt-get at keeping on hold packages which are temporarily broken due to some not yet finished changes while still installing new packages when required. With aptitude it’s also possible to tweak dynamically the suggested operations while apt-get doesn’t allow this. And aptitude’s command line is probably more consistent: with apt-get you have to switch between apt-get and apt-cache depending on the operation that you want to do, aptitude on the other hand does everything by itself.

Take some time to read their respective documentation and to try them.

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Debian Cleanup Tip #6: Remove automatically installed packages that are no longer needed

March 7, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

Last week we learned how to identify cruft on your Debian system. This week, for the last article in this series, we’ll learn more about automatically installed packages and how to get rid of them when you don’t need them any longer.

APT tracks automatically installed packages

When you install a new package with apt-get/aptitude/synaptic, it’s very common to end up installing many more packages: those are the dependencies of the installed package. Here’s an example:

$ sudo apt-get install pino
[...]
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libdbusmenu-glib1 libgee2 libindicate4 libnotify1 notification-daemon
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libdbusmenu-glib1 libgee2 libindicate4 libnotify1 notification-daemon pino
0 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 478 kB of archives.
After this operation, 2531 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

After this installation, the 5 “extra packages” will be marked as “automatically installed”. What does this mean? It means that you have not explicitly requested their installation and that the system should be free to remove them as soon as they are no longer needed.

You can verify that this is effectively the case with “apt-mark showauto” (it returns a list of the automatically installed packages).

$ apt-mark showauto |grep libdbusmenu
libdbusmenu-glib1
$ apt-mark showauto |grep pino
$

Aptitude shows this information with the “A” letter in its interactive interface and in the “aptitude search” output. “aptitude show” has a dedicated field for this:

$ aptitude show libdbusmenu-glib1
Package: libdbusmenu-glib1               
New: yes
State: installed
Automatically installed: yes
Version: 0.3.7-1
[...]

In Synaptic, it’s not very visible but once you have selected an installed package, you can verify in the “Package” menu whether “Automatically installed” is checked or not.

APT tells you which packages are no longer needed

Over time, some of those automatically installed packages become unnecessary because the packages that depended on them no longer do. It might be that they are using a newer version of the same library, or they switched to use something else, or they are able to do the task themselves.

Whatever the reason, the original dependency has vanished and the automatically installed package is no longer needed on the system.

Aptitude will automatically remove those unneeded packages the next time you run it but apt-get and synaptic do not.

Apt-get will inform you that some packages are no longer needed and will even tell you how you can get rid of them:

$ sudo apt-get remove pino
[...]
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  notification-daemon libdbusmenu-glib1 libnotify1 libgee2 libindicate4
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  pino
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 219 not upgraded.
After this operation, 1225 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 
[...]
$ sudo apt-get autoremove
[...]
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libdbusmenu-glib1 libgee2 libindicate4 libnotify1 notification-daemon
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 5 to remove and 219 not upgraded.
After this operation, 1307 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 
[...]

Synaptic will show you the packages that can be removed in a new section name “Installed (auto removable)” if you select the “Status” button in the bottom-left pane.

It’s thus a good habit to get rid of those unneeded package from time to time.

Use this feature to trim down your system

While APT usually sets the “Automatically installed” flag, you can also set it manually. It’s a very simple way to tell the system “I don’t need this package directly, feel free to remove it if nothing else requires it”.

# With apt-get
$ sudo apt-mark markauto libxml-simple-perl
# Or with aptitude
$ sudo aptitude markauto libxml-simple-perl

You can also do it in the interactive interface of aptitude with the key “M” (and “m” for unmarking). To do it in Synaptic, you have to use the menu entry “Package > Automatically installed”.

Many users like to have a minimal set of packages installed but they don’t really know which packages are really important and trying to remove every package to look what happens is cumbersome.

Thanks to this feature, you don’t try removing packages but you flag them as automatically installed. There is few risks in doing so when it concerns libraries (including python/perl modules). If the package is not indirectly needed by one of your important packages, it will be removed by apt-get autoremove, otherwise it’s kept for as long as it’s needed.

I would suggest to not mark as such packages of priority higher or equal to important to avoid nasty surprises (although I say this to not be blamed in case you remove too much, in theory the system should not remove essential components and all dependencies should be complete).

Also be aware of the consequences when you mark “task” packages like “gnome” as automatically installed… it will suggest you to remove your whole desktop. If you want to trim down the default desktop, you should “unmark” the desktop packages that you want to keep:

$ sudo apt-mark unmarkauto gnome-session gnome-panel

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Debian Cleanup Tip #3: get rid of third-party packages

February 14, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

Last week, we learned how to get rid of obsolete packages. This time, we’re going to learn how to bring back your computer to a state close to a “pure” Ubuntu/Debian installation.

Thanks to the power of APT, it’s easy to add new external repositories and install supplementary software. Unfortunately some of those are not very well maintained. They might contain crappy packages or they might simply not be updated. An external package which was initially working well, can become a burden on system maintenance because it will be interfering with regular updates (for example by requiring a package that should be removed in newer versions of the system).

So my goal for today is to teach you how to identify the packages on your system that are not coming from Debian or Ubuntu. So that you can go through them from time to time and keep only those that you really need. Obsolete packages are a subset of those, but I’ll leave them alone. We took care of them last week.

Each (well-formed) APT repository comes with a “Release” file describing it (example). They provide some values that can be used by APT to identify packages contained in the repository. All official Debian repositories are documented with Origin=Debian (and Origin=Ubuntu for Ubuntu). You can verify the origin value associated to each repository (if any) in the output of apt-cache policy:

[...]
 500 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny/main i386 Packages
     release v=5.0.8,o=Debian,a=stable,n=lenny,l=Debian,c=main
     origin ftp.debian.org
[...]

From there on, we can simply ask aptitude to compute a list of packages which are both installed and not available in an official Debian repository:

$ aptitude search '?narrow(?installed, !?origin(Debian))!?obsolete'
or
$ aptitude search '~S ~i !~ODebian !~o'

You can replace “search” with “purge” or “remove” if you want to get rid of all the packages listed. But you’re more likely to want to remove only a subset of carefully chosen packages… you’re probably still using some of the software that you installed from external repositories.

With synaptic, you can also browse the content of each repository. Click on the “Origin” button and you have a list of repositories. You can go through the non-Debian repositories and look which packages are installed and up-to-date.

But you can do better, you can create a custom view. Click on the menu entry “Settings > Filter”. Click on “New” to create a new filter and name it “External packages”. Unselect everything in the “Status” tab and keep only “Installed”.

Go in the “Properties” tab and here add a new entry “Origin” “Excludes” “ftp.debian.org”. In fact you must replace “ftp.debian.org” with the hostname of your Debian/Ubuntu mirror. The one that appears on the “origin” line in the output of apt-cache policy (see the excerpt quoted above in this article).

Note that the term “Origin” is used to refer to two different things, a field in the release file but also the name of the host for an APT repository. It’s a bit confusing if you don’t pay attention.

Close the filters window with OK. You now have a new listing of “External packages” under the “Custom Filters” screen. You can see which packages are installed and up-to-date and decide whether you really want to keep it. If the package is also provided by Debian/Ubuntu and you want to go back to the version provided by your distribution, you can use the “Package > Force version…” menu entry.