Sir,

Sorry for disgusting you asking same question again and again.As I am new to Debian. Please help me.

I have installed Debian wheezy( testing ) freshly on my system. I have downloaded all the packages approximately 36000 from online repositories using apt-get download command. As I want to install maximum number of packages. Which is the best and easiest method to install these packages with minimum intervention from me like aptitude, synaptic, dselect or any other command.


Regards,
Rupesh.

Is this possible? Looking at man apt-get, it seems that apt-get download requires at least a package name -- apt-get download pkg.

This sounds, to me, like a really bad idea. But it should be relatively easy to use Synaptic to select a lot of packages and then install them. In Synaptic, you can click on the "Status" button, then click on "Not installed," and you'll have a list of all packages that are currently not installed.

It's possible to actually go to the resulting package list in Synaptic, click on the first package on the list, scroll down to the end of the list, and while holding down the Shift key, click on the last package on the list, and that selects every package in the "Not installed" list. Then you could, in theory, go up and click Package > Mark for Installation, which would mark all of those uninstalled packages for installation!

I wouldn't advise it, though. If you really wanted to do all that, be prepared to wait a long time while Synaptic tries to mark over 30,000 packages for installation.

Then, if that actually works, you could click on "Apply."

Then, if that actually works, be prepared to wait a very long time while the changes are applied!

However, it is much better to simply use Synaptic to install only the packages that you really need to add.

sir I have downloaded the packages using the command

apt-cache pkgnames|sort -u > package_names && apt-get download `cat package_names` --ignore-missing

In synaptic suppose I select 200 packages and mark them as install. Message box is appearing as you have to remove the following packages and the list may be 50 to even 150.

In order to make my ambition true I have to select single and mark it as install if it suggests removing of already installed packages I have to deselect it if not install. This process is taking months.

I cant select all the packages in not installed category and mark them as install.

I heard that tasks topic is there in aptitude for example to install all packages related to gnome there is a task for gnome in aptitude. I don't know the exact procedure so can u suggest how to of aptitude.


Regards,
Rupesh.

I don't know why you would ever want to install all of the packages in the Debian repositories. Do you have some compelling reason to have every single application available on the Debian repos installed on your system???

If you downloaded all the packages to a directory, then just cd into that directory, then run as root:
You may run into dependency problems if, for example, you install package B before it's dependency package A is installed. You may have to run that command a few times to get everything installed.

Let us know how this works out. I have never heard of anyone who wanted to install all the packages available on any distro. I hope your root partition is big enough.

I agree with the comments in tommcd's reply. I think it is much safer to only selectively install packages that you really need rather than trying to install as many packages as possible, assuming that I'm understanding what you're trying to do. There are many thousands of applications available to you from the Debian repositories, but I can't see any reason for trying to install them all.

But perhaps I have misunderstood.

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure that I can help here. I've been a Debian user for several years, but I would never attempt what I think you're trying to do.

Sir,

No need to bother about hardware which I am listing below

AMD64 FX-4100 CPU
Gigabyte motherboard
500GB hard disk
8GB RAM.


I want help on aptitude. Can u provide tutorials,books,references about aptitude.

You have already looked at man aptitude?

http://wiki.debian.org/Aptitude (Debian wiki covers almost everything else you will need to know, too).

I don't get why you want to install all possible packages, but since you do, I advice to be very careful on what repositories you have in your /etc/apt/sources.list Make sure you don't simultaneously use repositories for testing, unstable, experimental, etc, in fact, better only use one deb and one deb-scr entry, or you will end up in a cross-conflicting dependencies hell that will be really hard to resolve.

If I recall well, *all* available packages would mean 2-3 kernels or more, 3-4 different (and possibly conflicting) versions of libraries, etc. The message box that appears in synaptics requesting you to remove packages, is there because you are trying to install conflicting packages. Debian package system *has* to take care of dependencies and won't let you get in the way.

(edited):
IIRC, there are virtual packages that will satisfy every dependency for a given package. Ie,
apt-get install kde
will install kde-base with all the dependencies (and probably some packages of the 'recommended' category).

BTW, maybe this will convince you that it's not a good idea try to install all the packages:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/de...html#s-depends
Debian just won't let you install packages that conflict, replace or break other packages.

tasksel will grab most things. You really can't grab everything. nVidia, and ATI drivers do not co-exist. And other this "or" that, but "not and" packages.

$ dpkg -l

Will list your installed packages.

$ dpkg-query --load-avail -l '*'

Will list ALL packages. Which you could use awk to strip out just the package names and pass that to apt-get install. But it will fail as you cannot install all packages. But you can pipe that list to a file and edit the file then pass the file to apt-get install. Still a bit of a waste as some things are daemons that "NEED" to be configured before being run. And while debian configurations tend to be semi-sane, they're not always out-of-the-box ready to be used.

If you're not worried about current packages, you could grab all the *.deb packages from the CD / DVD images and put them into /var/cache/apt/archives/. Which will allow you to install those when needed, without having to bother with a network and a download. This implies that you use only the CD / DVD images for the install. Since a lot of packages will become obsolete as soon as something like GCC updates in the repositories available online. If they weren't already obsolete the day before the images were made available for download.

As I look at my own system.

$ dpkg-query --load-avail -l | wc -l
1647

$ dpkg-query --load-avail -l '*' | wc -l
49813

There's some headers on that list and some packages that are virtually there for dependency reasons. And this is for Debian/sid. But I have a lot of things installed already. Enough to compile openjdk from sources. And things like libreoffice. But I do not have gnome or KDE installed (yet) as I'm using IceWM.