Ubuntu Wiki

Introduction

Aptitude can give you fine grained package management, and will give you an easily traversed map of the ubuntu packages available to you. This page is meant to be a quick reference to aptitude's interactive mode, and should be enough for you to get started. Aptitude's manuals are linked under Further Information, and links to other useful documentation are welcomed.

Navigating the Ubuntu package pool

The startup view for aptitude displays a list of the top level groups.

Key commands available when a group is selected

• [ - Expand the currently selected group, and all its subgroups

  ] - Collapse the currently selected group, and all its subgroups

  Enter - Expand or collape the currently selected group.

Key commands available when a package is selected

• d - view the package dependencies (packages that this package uses)

  r - view the reverse dependencies (packages that use this package)

  Shift-c - download and view the changelog

  Enter - view information about the selected package

Key commands available everywhere

• u - update the package lists

  j - move down one line

  k - move up one line

  q - retreat to the previous view (and exit aptitude if at the top view)

The navigation keys (PageUp, Home, PageDown, etc.) work pretty much as expected.

You can navigate through the dependencies of the packages available to you by selecting a dependency in a package's information view, and pressing enter. Rinse, repeat.

Package Management

Artistic use of the available actions can twist your system into just about anything.

Most common actions on a package

• + (plus) mark package for installation

  - (minus) mark package for removal

  _ (underscore) mark package for purging

  = (equals sign) mark package as held

Committing your actions

• Press g once to view the marked actions

  Press g a second time to act

Searching for packages

• / - (forward slash) search for search term or partial package name

  \ - (back slash) repeat last search

  l - (lower case L) limit the view to packages matching the search expression.

Useful search terms

~ is 'tilde'

• ~b - matches broken packages

  ~c - matches partially uninstalled packages ('configured, but not installed')

  ~ahold - matches held packages

Further information

• "man aptitude" at a command prompt.

  [file:///usr/share/doc/aptitude/README]

  [file:///usr/share/doc/aptitude/html/en/index.html]

Ubuntu package organization

• links needed

Tips

If more than one version is available for a particular package (look at the bottom of the package's information view), apt-cache policy <package> seems to be the best way to see which comes from which repository.

CategoryDocumentation