In this Ghacks Linux entry, I am going t dispel the myths and fear of the dist-upgrade command. Of course, as with everything PC-related, you know their are always risks when you do a major upgrade. With that warning out in the open, let’s set out to curb a little fear.

Differences

First I want to compare the two apt-get options: upgrade and dist-upgrade. The difference between these two is very simple. The upgrade option is used only to install all of the newest versions of the packages already installed on your machine. This is what happens when you see the upgrade upgrade packages through the Update Manager (You know, when you are made aware of notification in your panel and then Update Manager opens to show you which  updates are available for your system.)

The dist-upgrade option is quite different from upgrade. But just what does dist-upgrade do? Simple. The dist-upgrade option not only will upgrade all of the currently installed packages on your system it will also handle the dependency changes with new versions of packages. In other words, dist-upgrade will remove obsolete packages from your system, whereas upgrade will not. This function is out of necessity for upgrading from one distribution release to another.

But doesn’t it upgrade my distro?

Not necessarily. Although, by itself, dist-upgrade, will prepare your system for a distribution upgrade, the only way it will actually perform the upgrade to a new release is if you have changed your /etc/apt/sources.list file to reflect the change. In other words, you have to add the repositories for the new distribution in the sources.list file before this can happen.

Well that sounds simple. Yes it is. But it is not the recommended plan of attack for upgrading to a new distribution. Although it will work, there is a better way…by command. The command do-release-upgrade was created specifically for upgrading the operating system to the latest release via the command line. Of course, before you issue this command you will want to check to see if an upgrade is available with the command sudo do-release-upgrade -d. When you do this you you be informed if a new release is available. If there is a new release available issue the command sudo do-release-upgrade and the upgrade process will begin. Of course this is a rather lengthy process and there are risks involved.You could lose packages you have manually installed (that are not supported by the new release) or (worst case scenario) your system could become unstable.

Distribution upgrades are always tricky. I have had them go exceedingly well and I have had them go very awry. It’s a gamble. But now you know exactly how to manage the task from the command line. You are now, officially, dangerous. ;-)

Well, there’s a handy tool that will take care of all of that for you. The tool is called APTonCD. What this tool does is create a CD with all of the applications you have installed – basically a portable repository. And, with the same tool, you can restore all of the packages on the CD – all from one convenient GUI.

Features

Choose specific packages on your local machine (or choose all).

Download entire repositories.

Burn CD/DVD from within APTonCD.

Create and restore from same GUI.

Auto-selection of dependencies option.

Easy to use.

Installation

The installation is simple:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software Application.
2. Enter “aptoncd” in the search bar (no quotes).
3. Mark APTonCD for installation.
4. Click Apply.

Once the installation is complete you can close out the installation tool and get ready to use APTonCD.

Starting and using APTonCD

Figure 1

Once installed APTonCD is found in the Administration sub-menu of the System menu (GNOME desktop). Figure 1 shows the main window for the application. From this window you can either create a new CD or restore from an already existing CD.

To create a new CD click the Create button which will open up another window. In this new window (see Figure 2) the packages will be collected and, eventually, listed out for you. From this listing you can select the packages you want to include on your CD. By default all of the packages are selected.This window will also includ the total size of the completed installation. As you can see (in Figure 2) the total size of my restore CD will be 596 MB (some of the packages are not selected).

Figure 2

If you want to add packages not already on your system you can click the Add drop down and select either Packages or Folder and then navigate to those files/folders. You can also open up Nautilus and drag and drop packages into the APTonCD window.

Once you have selected all of your packages you might want to go to the Edit menu and select “Auto-select Dependencies” to ensure all dependencies are met on your CD. Now it’s time to burn. When you’re ready click the Burn button which will open up a Disc Properties window (see Figure 3). In this new window you select your medium, the destination for the image file, a file name, and whether or not you want to create a meta-package. The meta-package is one package that

Figure 3

includes all packages on the CD as dependencies. This makes restoration very simple in that all APTonCD has to do is select one package to install.

When you click Apply APTonCD will begin to create the .iso image that you will then burn onto disk using your favorite CD burning software.

When the iso has been created a new window will open asking if you want to burn the CD/DVD. This window will allow you to select that application you want to burn with. If you chose you can click No and burn the CD/DVD later. I have found the burn portion of the APTonCD to be a bit flaky, so I just always burn by open up K3B and burning the image.

Restoring

I would like to say that APTonCD can easily handle the installation of your packages with a simple click of a button. It can not. What APTon CD does is create portable repositories. So you can use the APTonCD restore option to basically add your CD repository for installation.  I have found, however, the best way to install the entirety of the packages is with the tried and true command line. This allows you to quickly get all of your packages installed with a couple of easy commands. What you will want to do is this:

1. Insert your CD/DVD created by APTonCD.
2. Open up a command line.
3. Change to the directory where you CD is located with the command cd /media/cdrom (Note: Your CD might be located in a different directory).
4. Change into the packages directory with the command cd packages.
5. Issue the command sudo dpkg -i *deb which will install all packages on the CD.
6. After the installation is complete you MIGHT have to use Syanptic in the event their are broken packages.

Close out the command prompt and check your Applications menu, you should be good to go.

Final thoughts

I hope that the developers of APTonCD will some day make it much easier to restore from the GUI. But even with the inconvenience of having to use the command line for quick restoration, APTonCD is a very handy tool.

In this article I am going to show you the basics of some of the more popular package management systems as well as the basics of installing via source. I will not spend too much time on each (otherwise this article could grow rather overwhelming). By the end of this article you should know how to install, querey, and remove applications with the more popular tools.

Source

Let’s start from the source. Generally when you download a package for installation that ends with tgz, gz, bz2, or *zip this will be a source installation. For these installations you are going to take advantage of some powerful compilation tools. But before you can start the compilation you have to unpack the source directory. If your file ends with a “bz2″ you will first have to ucompress the file will the command bunzip2 APPLICATION.tar.bz2. This will result in a new file like APPLICATION.tar. Tar is an archive system that rolls up directories into a file. To unpack the directory you would issue a command similar to tar xvf APPLICATION.tar. Unpacking the directory would then result in a directory (in our example) APPLICATION.

If the downloaded file ended in tgz or gz then you have a compressed archive and you simply have to add the “z” switch to the tar command to both uncompress and unpack the archive. This command would look like tar xvfz APPLICATION.tgz, which would result in the directory APPLICATION.

Once you have your directory unpacked you need to change into that directory (with the command cd APPLICATION). Once inside this directory issue the ls command. You will most likely see either a README file or an INSTALL file. Open those up and see if there are any special instructions for installation. If there are no special instructions then the standard compilation steps will most likely work. Here’s how this works:

• su to the root user
• From within the APPLICATION directory issue the command ./configure. This will generate a make file for the compilation.
• Issue the command make.
• Issue the command make install

That’s it. If all went as planned, the application should be installed.

RPM

RPM is the Red Hat Package Manager. Installing via RPM is actually quite simple. Here’s how this works. Once you have downloaded the rpm file you want to install, open up a terminal window and issue the following commands:

• su (you will be prompted to enter the root password)
• rpm -ivh filename.rpm (where filename is the actual name of the file you downloaded)

That’s it. If all went well your package should now be installed.

If you want to make sure your package was installed you can issue the command rpm -q filename and you should see the name of the package and the version that is installed.

If you want to remove that package you just installed (or another package) issue the command:

rpm -e filename

and the package will disappear.

APT-GET

This is one of the best installation systems available. With apt-get you do not have to download a package, you just have to know the name. Here’s how apt-get works (I am going to assume Ubuntu is the distribution, so you’ll make use of sudo). Open up a terminal window and issue the following:

sudo apt-get install package_name

to install the needed package.

To remove a package with apt-get you would issue the command:

sudo apt-get remove package_name

to remove the package from your system.

URPMI

The urpmi system is from the Mandriva distribution and is similar to apt-get. To install a package with urpmi you would open up a terminal window, become the root user, and issue the following command:

urpmi package_name

to install the needed package.

To remove a package with this system you would issue the command:

urpme package_name

and the package will be removed.

DPKG

This is the Debian installer and is as easy to use as any other. To use dpkg you will open up a terminal window and issue the following command to install a package:

sudo dpkg -i package_name

to install a package.

To remove a package issue the command:

sudo dpkg -r package_name

and the package will be gone.

Final Thoughts

There you go. A very basic description of package management with the more popular tools. Yes, there is much, much more to them than what you have just read, but this will give you enough of a foundation to get you going

But don’t think, when you fire up Aptitude, you are going to be greeted with a sexy graphical front end. No. When you start up this application you are going to be teleported back into the mid-90s when front-end applications were just arriving onto the scene. But Aptitude is so much more than that. Aptitude is a powerful tool to help you use the apt package management system.

To open Aptitude you need to first open a terminal emulator (such as aterm, gnome-terminal, or konsole). I will warn you, if you are like me and use Aterm in full-blown transparency Aptitude might look at little strange. So instead you should fire up another terminal or use Aterm without transparency.

To start up aptitude you will need root or sudo access. Using sudo you would start Aptitude like so: sudo aptitude.

Aptitude Main Window

There are two main sections to focus on. First is the main window. This is where you will see a listing of the what is available. As you can see from the image above there are upgradable packages, new packages, etc. What you don’t see is the Aptitude menu. To access this menu you have to hit the Ctrl-T combination (that is the Control key plus the “t” key at the same time.) When you open up the Aptitude menu you navigate this menu using the arrow keys.

Aptitude Menu

Before you actually get into installing packages with Aptitude, you have to select packages to install. You do this outside of the menu in the main window. Without the menu open you can move up and down the window entries with the arrow keys. When you land on an entry you want to expand you hit the Enter key. Let’s install something.

Using the arrow keys move down to the “Not Installed Packages” entry and hit Enter. This will expand to reveal a number of sub-menus. Now scroll down to the Net sub-menu and hit Enter. Yet another sub-menu will appear containing three entries. Move to the  “main” main entry and hit Enter to reveal all of the possible applications to install.

Network Applications Available

Let’s install Gobby (a text editor/source editor that can do online collaboration). With the arrow keys move down until you see the Gobby entry. When you find Gobby hit the Enter key which will reveal all of the gory details behind Gobby.

Gobby details

This should tell you everything you need to help you make the decision to install or not to install Gobby. Let’s install it.

To select an application for installation hit the “+” key (you do have to use the Shift key for this) to mark the package for installation. Now hit the “g” key and the installation process should begin. Don’t be fooled when it seems as if Aptitude has dropped out of ncurses mode and is in full console mode, it will return to it’s ncurses glory when after you hit the Enter key when prompted (after installation is complete.)

When installation is complete you will return to the description of the package you just installed. To go back to the main window you can open up the menu (Ctrl-t) and then using the right arrow key go to the View entry. Using the down key select “Prev” to go to the previous screen. You can also hit F7 for this same action.

And there you are, you have just installed an application with Aptitude. Of course Aptitude is much more powerful than this. In later articles we’ll discuss searching, upgrading, removing, and much more with Aptitude.

In the mean time, have fun installing with Aptitude!