Datasheet

84
Part I ✦ The Fundamentals
slash key tells aptitude that you will be typing in a term to search for. This term
will be searched for in all packages’ names.
aptitude will show your search’s first
hit. To repeat the search again and find subsequent hits, press the N key until you
find what you’re looking for. Here’s that same process broken down into steps:
1. At the prompt, type aptitude to start the program:
user@hostname:~$ aptitude
The main aptitude window should now be displayed.
2. Once you are in
aptitude, type a single forward slash (/) to bring up the
search prompt. Now type the term you want to search for. Press Enter to start
the search.
3.
aptitude will jump to the first package it can find that matches or includes
the word you have searched for. If this is not the package you are looking for,
press N to go to the next match. Keep repeating until you find a satisfactory
package.
For more information regarding aptitude’s searching and filtering capabilities,
see /usr/share/doc/aptitude/README.
Searching using the Debian package Web site
All the tools described above work on the package lists stored locally on your com-
puter. This means that they describe only packages that are available on your partic-
ular architecture for the Debian tree you’re using (stable, testing, or sid). This is a lot
of packages, but it will never be all of them. If you are using Debian stable, there may
be new software that is uploaded only into testing or even sid. Occasionally you’d like
to see what’s available anywhere in Debian.
http://packages.debian.org/ is the
Debian package Web site, and it’s a great resource for these sorts of situations. The
most useful sections of the site are the “Search package directories” and “Search the
contents of packages” windows located toward the bottom of the page. Using these
tools, you can enter a search term and search the complete list of packages in the
Debian archive through the archive’s Web interface.
“Search package directories” functions like
apt-cache search. “Search the con-
tents of packages” functions like
dpkg -S and dpkg -L, but you don’t need to have
the package installed on your machine to get results. Additionally, after clicking on
a package’s name in the results page, you can see other information like the pack-
age’s copyright license and its change log because this information is all provided
at the bottom of the page.
You can — but shouldn’t — download package files from packages.debian.org
and install them manually with dpkg. This will not always work, though, and it can
possibly break your system. apt-get and aptitude do a lot of consistency-
checking behind the scenes. Use packages.debian.org to find the name of
the package you want, and then install it with either apt-get or aptitude.
Caution
Tip
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