apt get

Introduction

When the Debian distribution was still somewhat small, dselect and dpkg were

adequate tools for package management. As the collection of packages has

grown in size and complexity these tools are no longer enough to provide a

smooth and easy installation.

The Apt project is expected to resolve many of these difficulties by providing a

new suite of tools to augment dpkg and provide a better installation tool than

is provided by dselect. While a full screen interface is a part of the design, only

the command line interface apt get and an apt method for dselect are currently

in a useable form. These tools are fully integrated into the current installation

process, and have done a lot to improve the installation.

In addition to installing packages, apt get is an excellent tool for upgrading an

existing system. Once you have the tool configured properly, you can upgrade

your entire system over the Internet with a single command.

The following pages describe how to set up this package manager as well as

just how to use it to install, upgrade and remove packages.

Selecting Archives

With dselect the Accept menu option is used to declare the location of

the archives.

apt get obtains this information from the configuration file

/etc/apt/sources.list. When the system installation has been completed from

CDROM this file will contain lines like:

deb cdrom:[]/ unstable contrib main

for each of the CDs that were registered during the installation process. While

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