[NTLUG:Discuss] Debian help

[Lance Simmons]

* Paul Ingendorf <pauldy at wantek.net> [030920 18:01]:
> So unlike the various up to date derivatives for rpm apt-get is not
> tied to packages but can be used to upgrade an entire distro?

In /etc/apt/sources.list you list URIs for whatever sources of .debs you
want to use.  (Developers often provide a URI for their programs, so you
can automatically retrieve updates.)  The most common kinds of URI are:
file, cdrom, http, and ftp, but there are (according to the manpage)
others.  

Suppose you change the content of your sources.list, say by adding URIs
for the "testing" distribution in addition to the stable distribution.
Now you can (if you want) "pin" your machine to stable, while still
installing many newer packages from "testing".  Or you can "apt-get
upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade", and you'll have upgraded your machine
completely to testing.

The thing I like most about apt-get, compared to (what I vaguely
remember about) rpm, is that it's easy to install all the dependencies
for a package without having to hunt them down individually.  "apt-get
install gnumeric", for example, installs all the gnome libraries needed
by gnumeric, even though I don't have any gnome libraries installed for
any other purpose.

If you're running Debian, the "apt-howto" packages provides helpful
documentation.

-- 
Lance Simmons