Install from Deb

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 8 Apr 2021 at 19:35, Ian Bruntlett <ian.bruntlett at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I hadn't heard of gdebi so I am pleased you mentioned it (btw it, itself, needs to be installed - at least on my Ubuntu 20.04.2).

It's the default package handler on Linux Mint if you let a web
browser try to open a .DEB directly. It was new to me, too, but I
spent a lot of last week working on getting Mint 20.1 working smoothly
on 2 elderly laptops for a friend of my partner's. A Thinkpad X301 was
dead easy, but a 2008 MacBook took a lot of work. Some details here
(including why Mint not Ubuntu) for the curious:
https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/79263.html

> If I download a .deb file, I would tend to use:-
> sudo dpkg -i file_name_of_package.deb

Yes, me too.

> Would dpkg work with installing a .deb file just as well as the gdebi command?

Yes, it would. The only thing is that AFAIK `dpkg` won't automatically
install dependencies -- it will install the package but not add in
anything it needs that is missing. It will tell you, and not run the
post-install configuration script if present.

So after you install, you sometimes have to run `apt install -f` to
install any missing dependencies. That command will then run the
post-install config script for the thing you installed with `dpkg` and
afterwards you're good to go.

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053