Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Do-It Yourself Computing 2: Packages

Filed under
Linux

In Linux Land, distributions are often divided into categories based on how they manage software. It's more than just keeping track of what is installed, but what version. The obvious issue is security updates. Software is usually offered in packages. Sometimes they are all self-contained; often there are packages which depend on others. These dependencies usually make sense, but not always. You don't have to be a developer to know there is no sense in requiring one package with another, when the second won't even use the first. Yet I assure you it does happen. Sometimes it's a simple matter of adding extra packages to add extra functions. Either way, it helps if the package management is smart enough to tell you what it needs to run when there's something missing. There are three main systems for package management.

Debian and its derivatives use DEBs. You recognize them because the file names end in ".deb" which can be installed in several different ways. Debian's hallmark is breaking packages down into smaller chunks, so that almost nothing is self-contained in a single DEB.

RedHat and its friends use RPMs. This is an abbreviation for RedHat Package Manager. Both RPMs and DEBs are compressed software bundled with a set of instructions which inform the management system what it is, where it goes, and what has to come with it (dependencies). The original tool for managing these RPMs is the rpm command, invoked always with switches to indicate what you want it to do.

Some packages are simply zipped up bundles, and have to be installed manually. They are usually marked with ".tgz" or some variation. Of course, if you are downloading source code to compile yourself, they also usually come with that on the end of the file name. Lately a slightly different zip format has become popular, which ends in ".bz2" -- both this and the tgz format will be covered more in-depth in another lesson.

Full Article.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.