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Practice: Debian package management

Exercises for setting up your Linux system and software

Roderick W. Smith, Consultant and author

Roderick W. Smith is a consultant and author of over a dozen books on UNIX and Linux, including The Definitive Guide to Samba 3, Linux in a Windows World, and Linux Professional Institute Certification Study Guide. He is also the author of the GPT fdisk partitioning software. He currently resides in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.

Summary: A package is software that is bundled and ready for installation on a Linux system. Installing and removing packages are basic operations for any Linux user or administrator. This article offers hands-on practice with Debian package management that will help you feel comfortable performing these tasks in a real-world environment. The exercises and solutions in this article focus on a variety of package management tasks.

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Date: 21 Jun 2011
Level: Introductory
PDF: A4 and Letter (140 KB | 5 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®
Also available in: Chinese Korean Portuguese

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About this article

These exercises and solutions supplement the developerWorks article "Learn Linux, 101: Debian package management," which is part of the developerWorks knowledge path "Basics of Linux system administration: Setting up your system and software." You may want to read the "Debian package management" article before working through these exercises.

Overview

These exercises give you practice in:

Learning whether a package is installed
Searching for a package to be installed on the computer
Installing a package using a network repository
Finding detailed information on a package
Learning which files have been installed from a package
Removing a package from the computer

Prerequisites

To get the most from the practice exercises in this series, you should have a working knowledge of basic Linux command-line tools. You must also have a Debian-based Linux installation on which to perform the exercises. (This article uses an Ubuntu 11.04 system as a reference, but any Debian or derivative distribution should work.) Some of the exercises require that the computer have a working Internet connection.

Exercise 1. Determine whether a package is installed

The bash shell is great, but you might be itching to explore the vast range of features of the Z shell (zsh), a text-mode command shell that can be used instead of bash. Before looking for a package, it makes sense to check if zsh is already installed.

Use the dpkg utility to determine whether the zsh package is installed.

Exercise 2. Search for packages

If it's not already installed, you could hunt around for it in any number of repositories, but there's a good chance you'll find it in your distribution's online package database.

Use apt-cache to search for packages that might provide zsh.

Exercise 3. Install a package with APT

Found it? Time to install it.

Use apt-get to install the zsh package.

Exercise 4. Determine a package's status

A package's status information can include version information, dependencies on other software, a description of the software, and whether it is properly installed, among other useful things. Say that you installed zsh and now you want to see if the installation went alright.

Use dpkg to find extended status information on zsh.

Exercise 5. Identify files associated with a package

Packaged software of any complexity usually consists of multiple files.

Use dpkg to identify the files that were installed as part of zsh.

Exercise 6. Uninstall a package

Is Z shell not meeting your needs? Get rid of it.

Use apt-get or dpkg to uninstall the zsh package.

Exercise solutions

Follow these solution steps to check your work.

Resources

The developerWorks article Learn Linux, 101: Debian package management (developerWorks, May 2010) describes the commands required to complete these exercises.
The document Installing Debian Software with the Advanced Package Tool by Will Trillich describes APT in detail.
At the LPIC Program site, find detailed objectives, task lists, and sample questions for the three levels of the LPI's Linux systems administration certification. In particular, look at the LPI-101 detailed objectives and the sample questions.
Review the entire LPI exam prep series on developerWorks to learn Linux fundamentals and prepare for systems administrator certification based on LPI exam objectives prior to April 2009.
Exam Preparation Resources for Revised LPIC Exams provides a list of other certification training resources that LPI maintains.

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