On Fri, Apr 21, 2000 at 01:27:40PM -0500, Irish, Jon D wrote: > Is there a comprehensive list somewhere, of all of the available Debian > packages, that describes them in detail? Being new, sometimes I am not too > sure what exactly I need to install to acomplish what I want to do (vague, I > know ;-). The DSELECT program is pretty much overwhelming for me, thus I am > searching for this documentation.
You can read the packages status file for information from /var/lib/dpkg/status. This lists, IIRC, all packages available from your various apt sources, whether installed or not, and is somewhat more flexible than looking for the same information from dselect. You can search package descriptions at the Debian website, http://www.debian.org/packages, as suggested elsewhere. You can browse a site such as Freshmeat (http://www.freshmeat.net/) for tools which look like they'll fit your needs, and either check there for a Debian package, or query through one of the above methods the Debian packages list(s). If a Debian package doesn't exist for the particular tool you're looking for, you can generally install an RPM file through "alien", or install the software from a tarball or such. Note the the last case, you will almost always want to install the software to /usr/local (./bin, ./sbin, ./lib, etc.), as this is where software *not* managed by the Debian packaging system is supposed to be placed. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http:/www.netcom.com/~kmself What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ GPG fingerprint: F932 8B25 5FDD 2528 D595 DC61 3847 889F 55F2 B9B0
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