Application-related howtos
Package Management Made Easy With Apt
Ever wanted to know if your RPMs were the latest, most stable versions? Ever
tried to install an RPM and got messages like "Need xxx to install yyy".
Then you go and find xxx and install it and find it needs zzz. So you find that RPM
and install it and find it wants .... You get the picture.
Well, Apt may be the very tool you need. Apt permits packages to be installed by name
(without needing to know the exact version). Apt will figure out dependencies and install
them first. Apt will figure out if your distribution (e.g. Red Hat 9) vendor (e.g.
Red Hat) have any package updates (to fix security or stability problems).
Thanks to the good folks at http://freshrpms.net,
Apt is installed on (almost) all RimuHosting VPSs. Usage is as follows:
# update the db of available rpms. Do this before running the other commands.
apt-get update
# upgrade currently installed rpms to the most stable version
apt-get upgrade
# find what package provides some functionality you're after
apt-cache search somekeyword
# install a new package
apt-get install nameofthepackagenoversion
# remove a currently installed package
apt-get remove nameofthepackagenoversion
FWIW, Apt was originally only available for Debian users. Red Hat recently put
out a similar tool to apt called up2date. This tool provided similar functionality,
but was a paid for service and required user registration. More recently Red Hat
started supporting yum. RimuHosting provide Apt since it works across all our
distros, and it seems faster than yum (subjective opinion, mind).
Users on VPSs with 64MB or less of memory may run into issues using apt-get. The
VPS may run out of memory. In that case you may need to restart the VPS (via the RimuHosting control panel). After that, shut
down a few services (e.g. httpd and mysql), and retry the apt-get command. Then
restart the services.
Resolving: The following packages have been kept back
You may get this message when you run apt-get update. It means
one of the updated packages has a dependency which does not currently
exist on your system. If you want to install these new dependencies as well as update
the package, run apt-get dist-upgrade instead.
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