On Wednesday 07 November 2001 14:10, David Z Maze wrote: > ol1 <op> writes: > ol1> Also sprach Preben Randhol: > PR> Which installer should I recommend to a beginner of > Debian (and Linux?). PR> > PR> I remember I saw somewhere on the web an article that > covered a lot of PR> debian installers, but I cannot seem to > find it. ol1> > ol1> apt-get > ol1> all the gui stuff is just confusing. > > But how do you know what to type as parameters to apt-get if > you're just starting? 'apt-get install' also misses a lot of > things like Recommends: and package descriptions. > > Is the recommendation to someone using stable, or > testing/unstable? In unstable/testing, I like aptitude quite a > bit (though you should read /usr/share/doc/aptitude/README > first, since there are a lot of things that aren't in the > online documentation). The version of aptitude in stable > isn't particularly featureful, so for stable, I'd recommend > learning to use dselect (it isn't actually as bad as people > make it out to be).
I learned on dselect and used it for 2 months or so because I didn't even know there was a thing called apt-get. I have long forgotten how to use dselect :). Use apt-get, to find out more information on a package, like what is suggested and recommended check out the package you wish to install at: http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages I had been using this method for about a year before I even learned of apt-cache search, et all. If you install a program and it's missing a feature, check for suggests and recommends, that almost always fixed what I thought was "broken." You may also want to check out: http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/ which has a newbie introduction to apt-get. The site includes the beginning of (hopefully) a slew of newbie type documents to come. You can apt-get all the docs from unstable, and maybe testing as well (package is called newbiedoc). If you don't know how or don't want to apt-get from unstable you can get tarballs from the site. HTH, Jesse
