Migrating from WinXP Pro to Ubuntu 10.10

[Jordon Bedwell]

On Fri, 2010-10-15 at 22:07 -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
> Among you, Mr. Bedwell, Mr. Ferreira, and Mr.Pursell - I'm now 
> totally confuzed ;/
> 
> Although advised to 'fireup a command line console and type "sudo 
> synaptic" ', is "synaptic" a GUI? Is it part of "Live CD" &/or 
> USB created from it?
> 
> After launching a "live" "???" of Ubuntu 10.10 [it's on USB 
> drive] what am I launching when clicking leftmost item in menu bar?

Firing up a terminal and typing synaptic is superfluous, it's much
faster to either type alt+f2 and type synaptic or even faster yet to
just go to "System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager" since
it's not hidden and yes, synaptic is a GUI.

Synaptic is a GUI front-end to apt, apt is a command line front-end to
dpkg, and dpkg is the low level package system for Debian based distros.

Synaptic: GUI (Front-End to APT)
APT: Command Line (Front-End to DPKG)
DPKG: Command Line (Low Level, Parent Packaging System)

Examples of APT and DPKG:

apt-get install package-name
apt-cache show package-name
apt-cache search package-name

dpkg-query -l apt
dpkg --get-selections
echo "package-name hold"|dpkg --set-selections

We could even go into aptitude and how it's a console UI too. Aptitude
is no longer provided in Ubuntu by default because it made it so there
were too many redundant package mangers and it can end up getting
confusing if you're new to Linux.