Introduction
Aptitude can give you fine grained package management, and will give you an easily traversed map of the ubuntu packages available to you. This page is meant to be a quick reference to aptitude's interactive mode, and should be enough for you to get started. Aptitude's manuals are linked under Further Information.
Navigating the Ubuntu package pool
The startup view for aptitude displays a list of the top level groups.
Key commands available when a group is selected
[ - Expand the currently selected group, and all its subgroups
] - Collapse the currently selected group, and all its subgroups
Enter - Expand or collapse the currently selected group.
Key commands available when a package is selected
d - view the package dependencies (packages that this package uses)
r - view the reverse dependencies (packages that use this package)
Shift-c - download and view the changelog
Enter - view information about the selected package
Key commands available everywhere
u - update the package lists
j - move down one line
k - move up one line
q - retreat to the previous view (and exit aptitude if at the top view)
The navigation keys (PageUp, Home, PageDown, etc.) work pretty much as expected.
You can navigate through the dependencies of the packages available to you by selecting a package that interests you and following its dependencies or reverse dependencies. Repeat as desired.
Package Management
Aptitude provides straightforward package managment, and artistic use of the available actions (combined with apt-pinning, see PinningHowto) will help you manage unusual repositories, such as backports.
Most common actions on a package
+ (plus) mark package for installation
- (minus) mark package for removal
_ (underscore) mark package for purging
= (equals sign) mark package as held
Committing your actions
Press g once to view the marked actions
Press g a second time to act
Searching for packages
/ - (forward slash) search forward for search term or partial package name
\ - (back slash) search backwards for search term or partial package name
l - (lower case L) limit the view to packages matching the search expression.
Useful search terms
~ is 'tilde'
~b - matches broken packages
~c - matches partially uninstalled packages ('configured, but not installed')
~ahold - matches held packages
~dtext - searches descriptions for text
~i - matches installed packages
Aptitude from the command line
You can also run aptitude from the command line.
aptitude update
# aptitude update
aptitude safe-upgrade
The safest way to upgrade (since Ubuntu 7.10) is to use the action 'safe-upgrade' as the previously used action 'upgrade' has been deprecated. The new action will upgrade a package only if it does not impact other packages, i-e: if it is necessary to add or remove a dependency package during upgrade, safe-upgrade won't upgrade.
# aptitude safe-upgrade
If you want to force the upgrade anyway, the action 'full-upgrade' (previously known as 'dist-upgrade') can be used. With this command, aptitude will upgrade to the latest version of a package even if it is necessary to add or remove dependencies.
# aptitude full-upgrade
aptitude search
Search for packages with "gnuplot" in the name
# aptitude search gnuplot
Search for installed packages with "gnuplot" in the name
# aptitude search '~ignuplot'
Search for packages from the section "gnome" that are not installed
# aptitude search \!~i~sgnome
For more complex searches and processing, pipelines are your friend:
# aptitude search '~i' | grep -ie 'x11\|xorg' | less
How to free disk space
# aptitude clean --purge-unused
Further information
"man aptitude" at a command prompt or see aptitude-curses.
Troubleshooting apt-get or aptitude or Synaptic package manager errors
Tips
If more than one version is available for a particular package (look at the bottom of the package's information view), apt-cache policy <package> seems to be the best way to see which comes from which repository.