Chapter 3Package Management

THIS CHAPTER BEGINS WITH a discussion of packages in general while focusing on the core features of packages and package management systems that cross most GNU/Linux distributions. In this discussion, I explain what packages are and what a package management system does. While I turn to examples from Ubuntu throughout, this discussion focuses on building a strong conceptual grounding. After establishing a solid grounding, I introduce Debian packages—the types of packages that Ubuntu uses—and give a brief view of the very different types of packages: source packages and binary packages. Most of the rest of the chapter focuses on package management in Ubuntu using the command-line tools. While many users of Ubuntu on ...

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