Command line tools for admin

[John Scott]

On 3/9/2013 10:49 PM, Nils Kassube wrote:
> 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
>
>

Yes, aptitude is the name of one tool I had forgotten. I was able to do 
an update and the system miraculously rebooted normally.  Thanks. 
Unfortunately my next reboot this morning undid that progress. There was 
a new kernel in that update stack and just like that I can't boot again 
because I think grub wasn't updated during the update. Hopefully this 
live disk will solve that though I suck at using grub. This 2 day old 
install is causing 2 years worth of problems.