Command line tools for admin

[Nils Kassube]

John Scott wrote:
> Since coming over from suse I've been lucky by not having to do that
> much on the command line. Now I'm having some major problems with
> Ubuntu installs that just stop working after an update. Under Suse I
> could use Yast for most command line admin and sax2 for X
> configuration. Are there Ubuntu equivalents?

I don't think you will find something like yast or sax2 for Ubuntu.

> I'd like to do command
> line updates of system packages and install missing items from a
> distro-level package list. For example I tried to switch to the
> proprietary radeon driver using the "additional drivers" tool and
> this left the gui unusable after restart. Nautilus crashes over and
> over. So I downloaded the ATI driver from AMD but can't install it
> because kernel headers aren't installed. If there is a command line
> package manager that can show me all the packages for this version of
> Ubuntu so I can select and install what I need, that would be great.
> Apt-get alone won't cut it without a list of packages to install.

Try aptitude. You can run it with command line options similar to apt-
get but if you run it without options it will give you a ncurses 
interface similar to GUI package managers. And of course you need root 
privilege to do that, so you are looking for the command

sudo aptitude

which will ask for your user password, not a root password.


Nils