Re: apt-get question

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

Eduardo Gargiulo <egargiulo@netscape.net> wrote:
>How can I lists the available packages on my Debian CDs with apt-get?
>Supose I need to install XWindow, how should I know which packages I
>have to install?

  apt-cache search whatever

I found that the investment of time in learning dselect was well worth
it, as it's a lot easier to browse with than command-line apt. You could
try something like console-apt instead.

There are other tools: 'dpkg --help' lists various search functions, and
if you install the grep-dctrl package you'll get the excellent tools
grep-available and grep-status. For any of these, you should make sure
you always use 'dselect update' instead of 'apt-get update'. When
dselect is configured to use apt, as it is now by default, 'dselect
update' calls 'apt-get update' and then *also* updates dpkg's notion of
available packages, so it's always worth using it instead.

Also note that on potato (2.2) systems you can run 'tasksel' to choose
from the selection of common tasks you get at installation time. Note
that it doesn't seem to check what tasks are already installed, but
that's OK as if you already have the task then it won't reinstall it.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]