[NBLUG/talk] The Debian Way

[E Frank Ball]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 03:21:59PM -0700, Walter Hansen wrote:
} I'm now starting to get used to the debian world a little bit. I love the
} apt-get. It's a little hard to figure out what to get, but I love it. 

synaptic is a nice gui for browsing packages, and it has a
search feature.

apt-file search
will search for a file name from within all the available packages,
so if there is some command you want, it will find the package name.
Install with "apt-get install apt-file" then run "apt-file update".

apt-cache show <package name>
shows info on a package.

apt-cache search <thing to search for>
runs faster than apt-file search and searches the package descriptions.


} Also
} the desktop takes some getting used to, but I've never used it much
} anyway, so that's probably mostly me(KDE).

So use whatever desktop you want. 


} I do want to know what sort of mechanism is commonly used for starting and
} stopping services and setting them up for run level. I'm used to the
} RedHat/Mandrake 'service xxxxx start' and 'chckconfig xxxxx'. Are there
} similar tools under Debian (shell/desktop)? Should I install tools I'm
} used to or is it better to learn the Debian way?

I've just been manually making/removing symbolic links.  I won't claim
it's better, but it works.  chckconfig was nicer, but it's not in debian.


-- 

   E Frank Ball                frankb at frankb.us