anyone running Kubuntu & vmware, or kubuntu & codeweavers?

[Daniel Pittman]

Art Alexion <art.alexion at verizon.net> writes:
> On Friday 30 March 2007 00:16, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
>> 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 it has the
>> > nice feature of tracking automatically installed packages.
>>
>> You can also use these features from the command-line, with the same
>> syntax as apt-get .  E.g.
>>
>> sudo aptitude install dependent-package
>
> I have read about the advantages of aptitude over apt-get before, but
> understood that one must use one or the other and not both.  

Well, no.  You can use both of them at any time.  You will get less
benefit from aptitude, but only just.

> Before I first heard about these advantages, I had been using apt-get
> extensively so I thought it was too late to change over.  If it is
> advisable to change over, what would be the best strategy?

Just change over.  Everything will work just fine. :)

If you use aptitude it marks packages as "automatically" installed when
it pulls them in to resolve dependencies or whatever.

If you install a package some other way -- adept, synaptic, apt-get,
dpkg or whatever -- aptitude simply shrugs and marks it "manually
installed."

So, if you install (say) firefox with apt-get and it pulls in a dozen
libraries aptitude will mark *all* of those as "manually installed" and
will never offer to remove them for you.

It will, however, just work.  You can manually remove them or even use
aptitude to mark things as "automatically installed" by hand.


So, yeah, just go for it.  None of the package installation front ends
prevent you using any of the other front ends -- the worst that happens
is some of their fancy features may not be quite so clever.

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
Digital Infrastructure Solutions -- making IT simple, stable and secure
Phone: 0401 155 707        email: contact at digital-infrastructure.com.au
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