Please help me understand aptitude
 

Hello,

I've recently decided to try switching to Debian from Gentoo, mainly due to tedious compilation time. Anyway, I'm in my third or fourth trial installation, this time with unstable.

This is the first time I tried to install manual packages from the initial setup, which finished correctly, unstsable sources used, aptitude dist-upgrade clean and all. Next I tried to install kde, and indeed aptitude installed it, or so I thought. Xorg wasn't installed as a dependency, which I promptly aptitude installed.

Tried an aptitude upgrade afterwards, and to my astonishment, it tried to uninstall all kde!!! What gives?

The reason I'm using aptitude BTW instead of apt-get is because it's supposed to be superior to apt-get.

Anyway, I want to do the simplest of things:

1. install a minimum system without exim4 et al
2. install xorg and kde
3. do a clean aptxxx upgrade
4. move on with more customization and other new packages

Can you please help me out? This are not obvious, and I believe I've RTFMed enough to no avail. TiA.

/coralsaw

what i do is first install the etch beta netowrk install cd then do a quick changing of the sources.list to sid then apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade now everything is up to date i install xorg, apt-get install x-window-system-core. Then i would add sources for the latest kde but since thats in unstable now no need, just do a apt-get install kde-core for a bare bones kde, then i just add my fav apps amarok, k3b kaffeine etc.

Thx ingvldr, that's almost what I tried to do, except I used aptitude. Would your solution work with aptitude?

I can't believe there's no clear cut process to what I want to do, it seems a very common task. Or not? :confused:

/coralsaw

apt has super-cow powers.

Errr, no, not really :) Debian does not need lots and lots of instalations ;-)

The truth is that the sequence is as follows:
Install base, change sources, apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, apt-get dist-upgrade, then apt-get install kde x-window-system

I started using aptitude instead of apt-cache and apt-get after my upgrade from Woody to Sarge. The reason was that Debian recommended using aptitude while doing this upgrade. I think they wrote something about aptitude beeing more thorough in its sanity checks. Never had any problems with apt before though and only main difference I see is that aptitude is slower (maybe because of more checks?).

apt and aptitude solve dependencies (especially cyclic ones) in different manners. I usually use aptitude - TUI - and I use apt-get in console.
BTW, aptitude is _the_ recmended wayto upgrade from woody to sarge.

Thx. Would your sequence work with aptitude, instead of apt-get?

/coralsaw

(1) Download the Sarge netinst .iso, burn it to CD, boot it with "linux26", and install the base system. (Or you can boot the install CD with "expert26", which will ask more questions but it gives you the option to upgrade straight to unstable.)
(2) After installing the Sarge base system, log in and type "nano /etc/apt/sources.list". Edit sources.list, changing "stable" to "unstable". Type "aptitude update", and then "aptitude dist-upgrade".
(3) Type "aptitude". Hit "F10" and configure aptitude's settings to your liking. Hit "?" to get help on using aptitude.
(4) Remove exim4 and install x-window-system and kde (plus maybe some other packages).

Once in aptitude's "TUI" (Terminal User Interface), you can update package list with "u", mark upgradable packages to be upgraded with "U" (in case you have disabled automatic upgrading in aptitude's settings), view planned changes with "g" and execute the planned changes by hitting "g" again.

You can navigate with up and down arrow keys (and PageUp and PageDown keys) and Enter. Hitting "q" will get you back to previous view (or exit aptitude, if there's no previous view). You can mark packages to be installed with "+" and to be removed with "-". Aptitude allows you to view any planned changes before executing them (and you can still make changes to your selections at that point).

Notice that Debian "unstable" has more bugs and broken dependencies than "testing" or "stable". This means that some packages may not be installable until the dependencies have been fixed.

Thank you dead parrot, I'll try your solution. :)

/coralsaw