Re: [Sheflug] Debian dselect...

[Matthew Palmer <nospam [at] ieee.uow.edu.au>]

On Mon, 14 May 2001, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:

> whatever from the command line... Simply enough, knowing nothing about
> Debian, I read various READMEs, install guides, etc., and they pointed me
> to dselect.

A crime, a pure crime.  The dselect interface is shocking, but I guess a lot
of people are scared of the command line, so apt-get is just 'too hard' for
them.  Pity.

> And anyway, I think, when your system is already up and
> running, you can use apt-get (or rpm -i) to (un)install individual

rpm -i and apt-get install are very different beasts.  apt-get will work out
where the package is, download it and install it, and it will also fix up
all the dependancies for you, by finding and installing *those* packages
too, automatically.  Last time I played with rpm <shudder>, it took a single
local filename and tried to install it.  If it needed some other package,
you had to go find it yourself and feed it to rpm.

rpm === dpkg.

apt-get === nothing redhat-native.  They've ported apt-get to RH based
systems, but the RPM format is short some of the more useful info contained
in a deb.

> packages. But when you want to look through all packages installed /
> available and (un)install a few packages at one go... Something like
> dselect / yast / ... might be helpful.

There are better interfaces coming, I am told.  The list of packages
installed on the system can be obtained in a number of ways.  My favourite
is something like

ls /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list

> Yep, as I mentioned before, there were 3 stages: 1) base system,
> 2) selecting groups of packages (like networking, C-development, etc. -
> can't seem to find what programme that was?) - after this step some

tasksel, IIRC.

> > The Debian "base package" (the 15MB tarball it sucked across before it
> > rebooted) contains a complete filesystem that contains a good 15 or 20
> > packages - enough to get you started (through the initial reboot and into
> > <shudder> dselect).  Those are probably what you're seeing.
> 
> Hm, no, dselect doesn't show base packages, so you don't uninstall them by

Beg to differ.  Never had dselect hide my base packages on me.  If I go to
remove them, it has an *almighty* whinge, but it doesn't hide them from me.

> chance:-) Those installed after stages 1 and 2 packages could be seen with
> dpkg -l (I think). Anyway, after letting dselect install all those
> packages, and then adding / removing some (couldn't remove some seemingly
> useless packages - dselect would resist strongly...), the system is up and

It's because another package depends on it.  That is a bit of a tricky one,
I'll admit - some packages show no apparent relation, yet they're required
for something to work.  Go figure.

> > From there, you
> > should probably configure your package sources (edit /etc/apt/sources.list
> 
> Aha, so, you can do batch-(un)installation with apt-* too?...

Yepo, that's what's so good about it.

> > if you're feeling adventurous - let me know where you're getting your
> > packages from (CD, FTP, HTTP, NFS, whater) and I'll hack up some appropriate
> > lines for you) and then run apt-get update.  When that finishes
> > successfully, then you can start installing more packages.
> 
> I used NFS to my another machine's CD-ROM. No, I couldn't simply
> re-connect it to the Debian one, Compaq Deskpro XL 5133 wouldn't allow you
> to connect an IDE CD-ROM alone without an IDE-disk and booting to SCSI...

Hmm... Done this one...

deb file:/<nfs mount point>/debian potato main contrib non-US/main \
non-US/contrib

Then whenever you change CDs on the mount point, you'll have to apt-get
update and then apt-get install <whatever>.  This will barf spectacularly,
since not all the necessary files will always be on the same CD.  Change CDs
starting from the end, and they'll sort themselves out.

A better way, in this situation, is to do something like:

find <NFS mount point> -name "<package name>_*" -exec sudo dpkg -i '{}' \;

and then if it complains about needing any other packages, you can do the
same for them, too.  No auto dependencies, but it's a bit less of a bother
than the apt-get method, as it'll explode slightly less violently.


-- 
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Matthew Palmer
mjp16@ieee.uow.edu.au

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