Re: A Question About Aptitude
* Clive Menzies (clive@clivemenzies.co.uk) wrote:
>
> Others have mentioned Synaptic, I found when playing with Ubuntu it was
> very easy to use but it seemed to do strange things and I inevitably use
> aptitude to upgrade and install. Aptitude is a steeper learning curve
> but well worth the effort. If you like a 'clean' system, deborphan is
> worth getting to know; it will highlight redundant libraries (and other
> packages) which you can then purge from the system with aptitude:
Actually, I find I am quite intimidated by most GUI programs. When I
first installed Debian it booted to GDM which took me straight to
Gnome with update notifier and synaptic running. I quickly dumped
Gnome, don't really like it, and switched to apt-get to avoid that GUI
which really just makes me nervous. After hearing about aptitude, and
realizing I could run it like apt-get at the command line, I felt
right at home. Just my way of doing things I guess.
On a related note, I sometimes wonder why so many people assume that a
newbie would be better served with a mouse and a bunch of nested
menus. My first real Linux installation was Slackware which of course
booted into the console, and it never bothered me in the least . With
man, ls and cd I had no limits and could just slowly absorb the things
I needed to know as I needed to know them. For me, there has always
seemed to be a safety and comfort to the command line. It has no
pressure whatsoever, and just waits quiety for you to tell it
something. And when you do tell it something, you can do it one thing
at a time and only do another when the first is done and you know it
did what you want. Very straightforward and easy to grasp when you
are brand new. All the flashing fancy graphics and windows, and those
seemingly endless menus within menus to try to find things seems much
more confusing to me. But, I suppose it goes to show how different
some people are.
Deborphan sounds great. I will definitely look into that.
> Yes there was a problem with a recent listbugs upgrade; I recall I held
> off upgrading for a while and then got bitten (in a very minor way). I
> never bothered with listchanges (I figured a change in functionality in
> any package isn't going to stop me upgrading) but I understand from what
> I've read on the list, they coexist perfectly well.
Unfortunately I have not gotten listbugs working yet. It exits with
an error and some complaint about a proxy. I will have to look into
its configuration, I use no proxy and so can't imagine what the
trouble is. I should have copied the error and so I could look more
easily, but I can do that on the next upgrade.
Thanks again,
Patrick
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