debian help

Crawford Rainwater crawford.rainwater at itec-co.com
Mon Mar 11 08:40:12 PST 2002


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Colin Marquardt [mailto:colin at marquardt-home.de]
> Sent: Monday, March 11, 2002 9:29 AM
> To: talk at nblug.org
> Subject: Re: debian help
> 
> 
> Eric Eisenhart <eric at eisenhart.com> writes:
> 
> > However, I find that when using debian, I never manually download .deb
> > files...  Much more useful are:
> >
> > apt-cache search pattern  # multiple if using woody or later
> > apt-cache show package-name
> > apt-get install package
> > apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade
> 
> Plus 
> 
>   apt-file search <pattern>
> 
> which lists the packages providing <pattern>. Not sure if apt-file
> was in Potato already, but it is in unstable as an extra package.
> 

In addition, you can look up and search on Debian's web site 
for specific packages by name or description topics as well.

I would recommend running the following before installing
the packages:

apt-get update

Then do the specific packages you wish to install.  This will 
update the apt-get "package list" with what is current and what 
is not, makes matters more up to date.

For the error message you got, does it say the package is listed
and cannot install it at the moment or cannot find it period?
If the prior, try

apt-get source --compile <package name(s)>

as well.  The other possibility is that it is in the unstable 
section and your apt-get source list has unstable commented
out or it has been temporarily removed for reviewing purposes
by the Debian gurus.  Had this problem with evolution installation
(the unstable sources were commented out).

Hope this helps.

--- Crawford



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