Okay so now what do I do since one of my favorite little command-line programs has been discontinued? I ran the script to convert all my debfoster info to aptitude, but I have no clue where it went or how to actually make use of it.

Maybe it's just that I'm more of a DOS person than a Unix person. I don't mind command line, but I sure don't like long, complex, strangely coded commands that seem to be required to make aptitude do some of the tasks that were so simple in debfoster. Supposedly aptitude has all the functionality of debfoster, but I sure don't see it. If I stop using debfoster, it looks like I may have to stop using Synaptic and apt-get as well (because they don't keep the "records" like aptitude does, and I won't have debfoster to help me go through the whole list)! That would seriously stink.

I'm a bit bitter about this. I think aptitude should have been deprecated in favor of debfoster (don't anyone shoot me).

Okay, aside from the philisophical ramblings, how do I use aptitude the way I did debfoster? I really liked the way debfoster, on first run, listed nearly every single package for my approval and gave convenient options for any preferred method for the disposal of unwanted software. I just can't figure aptitude out at all.

Did you read the man pages for aptitude? Otherwise you may try apt-get or dpkg. The updatedb command updates the database for the locate command, but I'm not sure the various package managers are using the same database.

yup, read the man page. Or is there more than one? I also read the one for apt-get and dpkg. None of them seem to actually do what debfoster did (i.e. give me the ability to easily scroll through and clean up packages). Not that it's entirely impossible, but it seems to be horribly inconvenient and very painstaking. In fact, I think Synaptic would be faster.

Fortunatly, it has been taken back by Florian Weimer, see:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugre...g=366518#msg15

We all like best what we have grown used to.

If you still want help with aptitude, you'll find it here:
http://people.debian.org/~dburrows/aptitude-doc/en/