Taken the Debian Wiki on Aptitude
Aptitude is an Ncurses based FrontEnd to Apt, the debian package manager. Since it is text based, it is run from a terminal or a CLI (command line interface). Aptitude has a number of useful features, including:
- a mutt-like syntax for matching packages in a flexible manner
- mark packages as "automatically installed" or "manually installed" so that packages can be auto-removed when no longer required
- colorful preview of actions about to be taken
- dselect-like persistence of user actions
- the ability to retrieve and display the Debian changelog of most packagesAptCLI-like (= apt-get + apt-cache) command line mode ("aptitude install foo")
- Score-based and (usually) smarter dependency resolver than apt-get
For Linux Mint 6, it already come with Aptitude pre-installed. Some useful commands are
After running it, use:
- F10 to access the menu and use aptitude. This is the main key.
- ? for help
- The 'up', 'down', 'left', 'right' keys to navigate.
- The 'Enter' key to select
- The '+' or '-' key to install/update or remove a package
- The 'g' key to preview/confirm actions
- 'q' to quit
You can also commands simliar to apt-get like
# aptitude install mplayer
# aptitude update mplayer
# aptitude upgrade mplayer
# aptitude remove mplayer# aptitude search mplayer
# aptitude --help (To get the rest of the options)
What is the advantages of using Aptitude versus apt-get? There are a lot similarities and overlap. From what I have gather from the forum and discussion, the advantages of Aptitude over Apt-get are as followed:
- Better Dependency Handling
- Better at removing obsolete packages from your system
- A different log presentation of the what packages have been affected during the installation / removal of package. On the other hands, apt-get tend to log what was present the information on the console during installation.
