Re: dselect

[Thomas Marteau <marteaut@esiee.fr>]

Hello Stephen,

	When I started using Debian, I was using dselect but soon I realized
that apt-get is your best friend. Here is the Debian package story:

Many servers around the world can deliver packages.

You have to specify one as Jurriaan told you. The file
/etc/apt/source.list must contain the info about where to find packages.

If you have a proxy, this sample of /etc/apt/apt.conf file can help you:

============8<===============
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://your proxy:its port/";

============8<===============

Then, if you want to know something about a package, do apt-cache search
<string>
Here you want to know about minicom:

#apt-cache search minicom 
minicom - Clone of the MS-DOS "Telix" communications program.
modemu - Telnet svcs. for comm progs

Another useful file is Contents-<arch>. You can donwload it from one
mirror. For example,
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/Contents-hppa.gz will be the
hppa file.

When you read this file, you see that for each file of the Debian file
system the related package.

The last step is to install via apt-get install <string>

#apt-get install minicom (will install minicom)
#apt-get remove minicom (will remove it)
#apt-get clean (will remove all the downloaded packages living in
/var/cache/apt/archives)

For the rest of the story, man is your friend :) Thomas.