APT (en)

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APT (short for Advanced Packaging Tool) is a package management system which finds it origin in the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, and is based on the dpkg package management.

APT was introduced in the Deambox world since OE 2.2. (For dreamboxes with OE 1.6 or OE 2.0, OPKG is used.)

The package management in the shell is a powerful tool for the Dreambox, and offers far more possibilities compared to the package management with the remote control. Of course, using the remote control is easy and most of the time adequate. But maybe this article can convince you to give it a try via Telnet or SSH.

Compared to the older Package Management Systems, IPG or OPKG, there is not only one command for the manipulation of packages. Several commands are possible, e.g.:

• apt-get - This command installs packages from the available sources. It considers the dependencies for the installed packages. Of course the can also be used to uninstall packages and many more manipulations.
• apt-cache - This command will not change the system. It's used to analyze (e.g. search) the package cache. The cache stores the meta-data for all available packages of the software feed
• dpkg - Is used for the manual installation / uninstall of packages. Keep in mind, dpkg is considering the dependencies during the installation / uninstall.

This article explains how to search / install / remove packages and some more interesting commands which offers APT. Additional interesting features of the commands can be obtained over the option --help.

apt-get --help
apt-cache --help
dpkg --help

Feeds

The feed files are stored in the directory: /etc/apt/sources.list

Install packages from feed

Install

A package can be installed with following command:

apt-get install package_name

Deinstallation

A package can be removed with following command:

apt-get remove package_name

To remove a package with all unused dependencies, use the command:

apt-get autoremove package_name

Local saved packages

Install

To install deb package, which are available on a computer, it needs to be copied onto the box in the /tmp directory. The installation is done with following commands:

cd /tmp
dpkg --install *.deb 
bzw.
dpkg -i *.deb

Deinstallation

To remove a package which was installed with dpkg, use following commands:

dpkg --remove package_name
bzw.
dpkg -r package_name

Update / Upgrade

Update

To update the package list, use following command:

apt-get update

Upgrade

To update the installed software, use following command:

apt-get upgrade

or

apt-get dist-upgrade

Update and Upgrade together

All in one go:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

or

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

Other useful commands

The missing dependencies can be checked with the following command:

apt-get check

install missing dependencies:

apt-get -f install

the cache (the downloaded install files) can be deletes with following command:

apt-get clean

search package

apt-cache search $package_name

or

apt-cache search . | grep $package_name