Ok. I am confused. I went to the debian site, and I looked up "bitchx" in the package search page. I got 4 different packages, all with long names, but all having to do with bitchx. One was for GTK interfacing, one was header files, one was the libraries, and one was bitchx itself.

But, when I did "apt-get install bitchx", I ended up with bitchx. How exactly did that work? Are there wrappers like in Gentoo? I certainly couldnt find a way to install all of GNOME2.

How did I do "apt-get install bitchx"? And can I do it for lots of other programs too?

When you run "apt-get install bitchx" bitchx and all its dependencies (those not already in your system) are installed. It's teh same with all other packages.

If it works like that, how do I do that for GNOME? If I do apt-get install gnome, it doesnt work. How do I find out what the keyword is for it to install all of GNOME? Like Gentoo.

Gnome2 isn´t yet ported to debian (even not in unstable), to get it anyway see http://www.hadess.net/idoru.php3

In sid (debian unstable) you can actually use apt-get install gnome which will install gnome 1.4 for you

just like to quete that even though apt-get install is nice to use you should learn and get comfortable with dselelect....it will not only select the dependencies (like apt) but also show recommendations and possible conflicts


for things like bitchx it is fine but for gnome or kde ... hmmmm

you could run dselect
and select say gnome-panel...that will pick up most of the dependancies....but you will need to look for others that may be required..not completelly sure...i am a kde person myself...and new kde3 is sweet
i am running sid on my wks and no probs! ... well...a few things had to be tuned

I have run Sid the last 4 month, and no problems at all (used woody as baseinstall). Sometimes when you try to install something, there is other package that it depends on isn´t available, but it normally is only a matter of hours (and sometimes which mirror to use, i have discovered that the danish mirror is more slow to be updated than the german for instance)

i used woddy as a base install as well.....
i use http://http.us.debian.org
seems the fastest for me....and most up to date

Sorry I was wrong, gnome2 IS ported too debian, but only as experimental. See:
http://people.debian.org/~walters/gnome2.html