package management

How to Make Windows Better? Make It Chocolatey!

Shawn Powers — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 13:46:18 +0000

Once again, my friend and fellow Linux Journal club member Kris Occhipinti introduced me to an awesome bit of software. This time, it's an open-source project that brings Linux-like package management to Windows! Don't get me wrong; installing software on Windows isn't difficult, but it's definitely more cumbersome than with Linux. Plus, with Chocolatey, you can keep your installed packages up to date as easily as you can with Linux.

There is an open-source version of Chocolatey and paid versions. With the open-source version, you can install and maintain all the community packages, which for me is plenty. Literally thousands of software packages are available to install with a simple command-line entry. And unlike Cygwin (a wonderful program as well), Chocolatey installs the same Windows applications you'd install if you downloaded the installers and went through the process on your own.

Installation on Windows can be done via the command prompt (cmd.exe) or via Powershell. If you open the command prompt as administrator (right-click, open as administrator, see screenshot), you can install with:


@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command
 ↪"iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString
↪('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET
 ↪"PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"

Or even better, go here for more options and a chance to look at the installation script before installing. The site actually recommends looking at the installation code before running it to make sure it's safe. That doesn't make me less confident of the code, but it makes me happy to see smart security choices.

So, thanks to making Windows a bit more like Linux and easing the process of keeping your software up to date, Chocolatey earns this month's Editors' Choice award. If you use Windows, head over to the website and check out this awesome system. It's especially useful for brand-new Windows installs, because managing all your third-party software with a single tool is wonderful. Thanks again, Kris!

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Pint-Size PPA Primer

Shawn Powers — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:52:22 +0000

by Shawn Powers

Package management in Linux is great, but unfortunately, it comes with a few cons. Granted, most distributions keep all your software, not just system software like Apple and Microsoft, updated. The downside is that software packages aren't always the latest versions. Whatever is in the repository is what you get. Another frustration is when the software you want to install isn't in the distribution repositories at all.

Usually, it's possible to add software packages, even if they're not in the repos. For Red Hat-based systems, those are RPM files. For Debian-based, they're DEBs. Unfortunately, installing applications that way doesn't give you upgrades when they're available; you need to keep them updated yourself. Most package management systems also have the ability to add third-party repos, but those don't always have the packages you want.

Canonical has a feature in newer versions of Ubuntu that allow the best of both worlds. They're called PPAs (Personal Package Archives). Instead of distributing .deb files, developers simply can distribute their PPAs. With a PPA, the software is updated automatically along with being installed in the first place. While installing PPAs hopefully will become simpler, in the short term, they're still pretty easy to install. You just need to find the right PPA structure, usually given by the developers that support the idea. For example, to install the Mozilla Daily Build PPA, simply type:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa

Someday, installing a third-party application will be as easy in Linux as it is in Windows and Macintosh. With ideas like PPA repositories, however, your software will stay updated. And, that sounds P-P-Perfect to me.

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Popcon - Are You In Or Out?

Michael Reed — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

Those of you who regularly install Debian may have noticed a prompt that asks you if you would like to install Popcon, the Debian Popularity Contest. Popcon gathers statistics about package usage and periodically submits it to Debian. The anonymous statistics gathered by the script are freely available on the Debian website, and the script can be invoked manually to give a clearer idea of package usage on your own system.

I must admit that I had always declined to take part in the survey. Some people will object on privacy grounds, but personally, I trust that Debian aren't going to do anything devious with the info. I had opted out because it sounded like another possible point of failure and didn't actually know what the project did.

If you didn't select it when installing Debian, you can install Popcon at any time via the package manager, and this doesn't hamper the quality of the data. If you're installing it manually, bear in mind that it installation script prompts for user input, so make sure that you can view the text output of your package management system. The information that it is actually gathering is the installation date and most recent access date of every package on your system. By default, Popcon gathers the information and submits it once a week using a cron job.

Once installed, you can invoke it automatically by typing (as root)

popularity-contest

You'll receive a long list of all of the packages on your system arranged in order of most recently accessed. Here is a sample of the output when I ran it on my Debian Sid box.

1290877204 1290877209 iptables /usr/sbin/ip6tables-apply OLD
1290877204 1290877339 ed /usr/bin/red OLD
1290877204 1290877401 laptop-detect /usr/sbin/laptop-detect OLD
1290877204 1290877230 libnfsidmap2 /usr/lib/libnfsidmap/static.so OLD
1290877204 1290877414 libruby1.8 /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/ftp.rb OLD
1290877204 1290877455 google-gadgets-gst /usr/lib/google-gadgets/modules/gst-audio-framework.so OLD
1290877204 1290877246 tcpd /usr/sbin/tcpd OLD

The first two numbers are the access and the creation time of the most recently accessed file within the library. The time is presented in Unix time format, that is, number of seconds elapsed since midnight January 1970. This is followed by the name of the library and the most recently accessed file in that library. The last piece of information is a tag which indicates if that library is considered old (not accessed for more than a month). There are tags to indicate if the library is recently installed or contains no runnable programs.

Obviously, the output for a typical system is going to be vast. For this reason, if you're invoking it from the command line, either piping to a file or grep is the best approach. For example, piping it to a file with

popularity-contest >popcon.txt

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APTonCD

Michael Reed — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 16:14:25 +0000

by Michael Reed

APTonCD is a GUI tool that can extract the .deb packages that you have manually installed on your machine and selectively copy them to an ISO image that can be burned to a CD or DVD. The tool can then be used, on another machine, to restore those packages. The main use is to create disc-based package collections that can be used to add packages to systems that don’t have an Internet connection, perhaps as part of a mass installation strategy.

Clicking on the create button causes the program to start collating a list of packages that you have added to your system. When the process is complete, it displays a list of packages that can be included or deselected. Optionally, all dependencies for the selected packages are included. You can also add extra packages at this point by manually directing the program to actual .deb files. Once this is complete, click on the burn icon and the program will very quickly create an ISO containing the .deb files. The program can even span a collection files over more than one disc.

Restoring is just as simple. However, it’s important to note that APT on CD doesn’t actually install any software to your system. Instead, it copies the .deb files to the APT cache of your target machine. This way, when you install the packages using your chosen APT tool such as the Synaptic package manager, the system wont attempt to retrieve the packages from the Internet. APTtoCD can load the .deb files from an actual CD that you have burned or from an ISO file located on another medium.

It’s worth noting that actually installing APTtoCD to a target machine is fairly simple as it is included in the collection of .deb files on the CD that you burn. Simply install it as you would any other .deb file.

The APTonCD website

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Alien - Use Any Package On Any Distribution

Michael Reed — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

Sometimes, a utility or an application that you want to install is impossible to find in the format of your distribution. Alien is a utility that can convert one package type into another. It can get you out of a fix when you can't find a package for your distribution, and it is also useful for package maintainers who want to distribute packages for distributions that they don't run. It can work with Slackware, Debian and RPM packages as input and output types.

It's surprising how much stuff you tend to come across that is stuck in a single package format. Printer drivers are an example of software that is often abandoned without sourcecode. Occasionally, developers of special interest software only create packages for their own system and there is no one else willing to build for other systems. If you can get the source code, and it compiles, you might be better off using that to install it via the package manager by making use of Checkinstall (see our quick guide) rather than using Alien.

First a word of caution, Alien isn't guaranteed to work with everything that you throw at it. As good as it is, think of Alien as a last resort rather than a preferred installation routine. There is sometimes a significant difference between the different package formats and the organisational layout of source and target distributions that means that it won't work properly. When you're using Alien, you're generally travelling in uncharted waters, and the Alien website advises against the use of Alien to install system level components.

Alien is in the package repository of most of distributions, and once you have it installed, it's simple to use. The format for the command is

alien [options] file

Note that Alien needs root privileges to run. The most important options, for most users, are -r, -d and -t for .rpm (Red Hat), .deb (Debian) and .tgz (Slackware) package output format respectively. Alien can figure out the input package format on its own. So, to take the .deb of wxCam and convert it into an RPM use:

sudo alien -r wxcam_1.0.6_i386.deb

You then apply the standard package installation tools of your distribution and hope for the best.

The Alien package converter website.

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apt-file: Locate Missing Package Files

Michael Reed — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

Ever had a source package fail to build due to a missing file? If so, apt-file, a tool that searches online repositories for a specific file, may be the answer.

Occasionally, when building a package from source, disaster strikes and the whole process grinds to a halt due to a missing file. Fortunately, this is increasingly uncommon due to the maturity of Linux package management and the ubiquity of Autoconf configuration scripts. However, some software projects don't use Autoconf, either because the maintainers prefer another solution such as CMake or because the program is too small to make setting up a configure script worthwhile.

Fortunately, on the rare occasions when this problem does crop up, there may be a solution in the form of apt-file: a member of the APT family of package management tools. This utility assembles an index of all of the files stored in the online repositories that your distribution is configured to use and allows you to search for individual files.

Case example: recently, I decided to check out KBackup, a KDE backup management utility that isn't currently in the Ubuntu repository. Following the instructions, I ran the CMake build tool, only to be disappointed when the build process stopped with a notice that it couldn't find a file called “FindKDE4Internal.cmake”.

To solve the problem, I installed apt-file via the command line:

sudo apt-get install apt-file

After installation, apt-file's internal index needs to be populated with the following command:

apt-file update

This process takes a minute or so to complete, depending on the speed of your Internet connection. Once the index was up to date, I searched for the missing file:

apt-file search FindKDE4Internal.cmake

and apt-file gave me a single line of output that told me everything I needed to know:

kdelibs5-dev: /usr/share/kde4/apps/cmake/modules/FindKDE4Internal.cmake

In other words, the file I needed was in the package “kdelibs5-dev”, which I installed from the command line:

sudo apt-get install kdelibs5-dev

After this, I was able to continue and complete the normal install procedure.

Note: if you do find an oversight in a source package that necessitates the use of apt-file in this way, even after a successful run of an Autoconf configure script, please consider telling the developers about it.

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