[CLUE-Talk] Trying Out Debian

[Matt Armstrong]

On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 11:35:14AM -0700, Matthew Porter wrote:
> 
> 2 - Anyone have hints/tips/warnings/dire prophesies for someone who's
> used to Red Hat and is about to install Debian?  

The #1 tips I give new Debian people deal mostly with the package
managment system, which is not based on rpm.  (and my major point of
confusion when dealing with a Red Hat system is rpm!)

dpkg is the analog to rpm.  apt-get is the analog to rpmfind.  Both
attempt to do more than their "red hat" equivalents.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian has no fancy xconfigurator style program.  There is XF86Setup and
xf86config, both straight from the XFfree86 project.  You might just
copy your /etc/X11/XF86Config file from your Red Hat install to start.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Say you have a file on disk, and want to know what package manages it?

    dpkg -S the-file
----------------------------------------------------------------------
What packages do I have installed?

    dpkg -l the-file
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Have a package and want to know what is in it?

    dpkg -L the-package

This is useful to find things like where the config files are.  E.g.:

    dpkg -L apache | grep etc

shows me:

/etc
/etc/apache
/etc/init.d
/etc/init.d/apache
/etc/cron.daily
/etc/cron.daily/apache
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Find a package and want to install it?

    apt-get install the-package
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The docs for a given package are always in either /usr/doc/<package> or
/usr/share/doc/<package>.  The config files are always under /etc.  The
manpages can be found with "man" -- and you can do "dpkg -L the-package
| grep man" for a list.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages page is extremely useful when
looking for specific packages.  You can search the package descriptions,
or their contents.  Quite frequently, when compiling something I might
get "can't find foo.h" compile errors -- I can use the packages page to
search for foo.h and find which package has it.

-- 
matt