Re:

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

On 8/2/10 7:06 PM, juan gonzalez wrote:
> all right, I have 2 questions. can I use .deb files on the the teminal
> version? and can I upgrade from the terminal one to the desktop one?
> and how?
>
>
>   
Yes; if you just have a .deb (say, "whatever.deb"), you can install it
with "dpkg -i whatever.deb".

However, as a general rule, you don't want to install .deb files
directly, because if whatever.deb is dependent on whatsit.deb which is
dependent on yeah_but.deb, etc etc, then it could quickly become painful
to install a program.

Instead, you want to use aptitude (or apt-get) to install a program. In
this case, it'd probably be "aptitude install whatever", which will
automagically install whatever and whatsit and yeah_but and whatever
else might be needed.

You can also run a curses-based (text-based) point-and-click style
interface of aptitude by just running "aptitude", but honestly, that
confuses me more than just using the command-line mode of aptitude.

To install a graphical version of Debian, you just need to install X,
along with some window environment/manager, such as KDE or Gnome or
Icewm, etc.

There are several ways of doing this:

aptitude install x-window-system kde gnome icewem

will install all the above. You can even "aptitude install synaptic" for
a more guified package manager than is aptitude.

Another way of installing a graphical environment is to run "tasksel",
which will allow you to select from several tasks, such as installing a
Desktop environment. But I'd go the "aptitude install x-win...." route.

While in text-mode, try "aptitude install links" or "aptitude install
lynx" for a couple of text-based web browsers. They can come in handy
sometimes.

-- 
Kent