Aptitude
From MEPIS Documentation Wiki
Aptitude is a package manager, a front-end to the Advanced Packaging Tool (APT), that can be used instead of apt-get or Synaptic. Available from the repos (for documentation, install aptitude-doc-en)
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Some advantages over apt-get
- Solves dependencies in a smarter way
- Cleans automatically when you remove a program by removing unneeded dependencies
- Pins packages in a very simple way: aptitude hold packagename and aptitude unhold packagename unpins the package.
- More complete options, it includes search, show, changelog, forbid-version options.
- Offers a GUI way to manage packages, newer aptitude (currently in experimental) offers a GTK interface, the older version offers a menu based interface.
Installing
Aptitude doesn't come installed by default on MEPIS to install it, run as root:
apt-get install aptitude
Important: Before using it run first:
aptitude keep-all
Do not use both apt-get and aptitude, stick with one of them, if you use apt-get you might need to run aptitude keep-all before you use aptitude to update, install, or remove packages.
Usage
It works in two modes, either as apt-get, by typing the command with options in konsole, for example:
aptitude update aptitude safe-upgrade aptitude dist-upgrade aptitude search programname aptitude show programname aptitude install programname aptitude remove programname aptitude purge programname
or, as a GUI that can be started by simply typing aptitude at the konsole prompt.
Where apt-get is a better choice
If you installed a .deb that doesn't have all the dependencies satisfied it's preferable you use:
apt-get -f install
to download and install dependencies rather than "aptitude -f install", if you do use "aptitude -f install" you might have to respond "n" to the first question because by default aptitude will try to remove the installed package rather than download dependencies.
