How to install packages on Linux?
Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at
19:52
1. How many types of packages are there to install on Linux
like (.rpm), kinly tell me all the types of Linux installables.
2. And how to install all these different packages?
Filed under: rpm
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Some days ago I was also in this difficulty. There are .tar, .deb, .rpm packages. They are something like zip file but I don’t know how to install them. I asked this questions in forums but everybody said "Use the repo". No one told me how to install Firefox from the .tar package i downloaded.
I will give you the same advice. Just open the terminal window and write this:
sudo apt-get install firefox
(You replace Firefox with whatever you want to install)
It will ask you for the password and then it will download everything and install it automatically for you.
You can later get these things in a CD by doing this:
Download this software called apt on cd from here:
http://aptoncd.sourceforge.net/
Install it and run. It will make an ISO image of everything installed on your Linux system and burns it on a CD.
Sorry I cant tell you how to install from those packages, but sudo apt-get package method is easier
There are severeal different package systems. RPM is different from DEB, which is different from Emerge, which is different from YUM.
It depends on your distro what will work for you. Most distros have a package management system – synaptic for instance is much easier to use than apt-get – it is gui / menu driven while apt-get is command line.
If you use Ubuntu, use synaptic.
the various source file options (tar, gz, etc) are the hard way to go with program installation. If you want to go that route, look for and read the instructions on the site where you get the software, or hope there is an instructions / readme file in the compressed file – and hope you can figure out the dependency requirements.
To be honest, I can bet safely that this is not the _actual_ question in your mind.
You’d have asked something like, how to install so and so software on a so and so Linux distribution. That is, if you had asked the real question in your mind.
There are, AFAIK, rpm, deb, tgz, emerge types of packages available for Linux systems. But any given system uses only any one of these formats of packages.
rpm -ivh package.rpm
dpkg -i package.deb
installpkg package.tgz
are the commands to install packages. I haven’t used the emerge package format. It is used on Gentoo systems. I bet you will find it exceedingly difficult to use at this time. So, don’t look at it now.
It all depends what kind of distro you are running, the most straightforward are the likes of Ubuntu 7.10 http://www.ubuntu.com/ or Linux Mint 4.0 http://linuxmint.com/ where you run commands from either the terminal or the synaptic package manager. See below on how to use these :
http://monkeyblog.org/ubuntu/installing/
Enjoy.
Lug.