Handy tip #1: [Aptitude]

First of all, I’m sorry I haven’t posted for a while–school went ‘banoonoos’ (as Joss Whedon would say), and any remaining time went to FSM.

Second of all, I’m contemplating starting a new ‘syle’ of post–handy tips. They’re meant to be concise bits of usefulness. Yes, yes, yes, this one isn’t very concise, but I consider it an extenuating circumstance They should have two parts–the [Background:], for…um…background information, and then another part which is the real tip.

That was way too long-winded. Sorry.

At any rate, here’s the real post:

[Background:]

A lot of people use the command line to install packages. Add/Remove is incomplete, Synaptic is slow, and the command-line is awesome.

I find myself using Apitude a lot more than apt-get, for the plain and simple reason that it’s a lot easier to make up commands. sudo aptitude install thunderbird works, sudo apt-get thunderbird doesn’t.

I always kind of got frustrated by the fact that after thinking for a while, I would need to type in ‘Y’ to confirm that I wanted to use disk space. (I suppose I can see the rationale for that feature, but it is annoying)

[Meat:]

To make Aptitude not ask you if you’re OK with the disk space it’s going to use, and the dependencies that have to be installed, use the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install yourprogramname

Where yourprogramname is the name of the program you want to install.