anyone running Kubuntu & vmware, or kubuntu & codeweavers?

[Derek Broughton]

Daniel Pittman wrote:

> My personal preference is to use aptitude(8) to install and manage
> packages.  Aside from being a good and responsive curses UI

I'm sure there's a good reason why it's called "curses" :-)  I don't find
the UI very intuitive, so I just use the CLI.

> it has the 
> nice feature of tracking automatically installed packages.
> 
> It works just like deborphan except that, you know, being the way you
> install packages it has absolute knowledge of what you did or did not
> ask it to do.
> 
> If you want this sort of extra cleverness then I suggest you trial
> aptitude before trialing tools that try to reverse engineer the
> information that aptitude *knows.*

The one drawback is that it _doesn't_ know anything about existing installed
packages.  I got around that when I first started to use aptitude by using
something like (don't trust me on this - it's a long time ago):

# aptitude markauto ~nlib*

to make all lib* packages "automatic".  There's also some way to do that
without it actually removing unneeded packages at the time (but I can't
find the option), so that you can use "unmarkauto" to reset the ones you
really need before anything drastic happens.
-- 
derek