I am installing ndiswrapper to get my Netgear WG311T wireless card working, and part of the instructions said to run the following command:

#aptitude install wireless-tools

I ran that command, and aptitude wanted to remove over 200 packages that it said are not used. Some of the packages are abiword-common, esound, evolution, gnome-system-tools, nautilus-cd-burner, sudo, synamptic, and many others including over 100 libraries. My question is can I let aptitude remove these packages, or will I loose programs and functionality? I am still too new to linux to know what these files do. I went ahead and installed wireless-tools with apt to keep from messing things up.

Thanks,

Don't let aptitude remove your packages! Maybe you have installed packages with synaptic -- synaptic installs additional "recommended" dependencies, just like aptitude, but aptitude doesn't know what you've installed with synaptic and so it thinks that you don't need any more the packages that synaptic has installed as "recommended" dependencies. I'd suggest that you just use the "apt-get install wireless-tools" command instead and that should help you to keep all your installed applications. Or install the wireless-tools package with synaptic if you want to install the "recommended" dependencies in addition to the necessary dependencies.

If you use synaptic to manage packages, there's really no reason to learn how to use aptitude. Aptitude is pretty similar to synaptic but synaptic doesn't know about aptitude's settings and aptitude doesn't know about synaptic's settings and this is likely to create unnecessary problems. There's no problem in using apt-get alone, or apt-get and synaptic, or apt-get and aptitude. But using both aptitude and synaptic can create problems.

EDIT:
I was a bit hasty and didn't read the last line of your post. You did the right thing.

Thanks for the reply. It didn't seem right at the time when I looked over the list. I figured better safe than sorry.