Ubuntu Hacks

Ubuntu provides a number of very nice graphical tools for managing software packages from the desktop, but sometimes you just have to get hands-on to really get things done. Servers don't generally have a graphical desktop environment installed, and ...

One thing that can be difficult to get used to if you are new to Linux is package management. On one hand, the way that Ubuntu handles program installation and upgrading is much simpler than on other operating systems. On the other hand, it's rather ...

Ubuntu's package-management tools are some of its greatest strengths. A huge amount of work has been put into the underlying management code in order to make it as flexible as possible, separating the user interface from the code that performs the ac...

deb Files Use command-line tools to install individual .deb files when other automated tools aren't an option. The package mana...

The Ubuntu package-management system is truly impressive. Simply choose a package name, and Ubuntu will automatically download and install it along with any dependencies it may have. What happens, though, when you don't know the exact name of the pac...

Here's how to build and install standalone programs from source. It used to be that when you wanted to install a new program under Linux, you would locate the project's home page, find a source tarball, download it, and then extr...

If you are used to installing programs on operating systems other than Linux, the idea of package managers and repositories might seem a bit foreign. To install a program on Windows or Mac OS X, you would insert a CD or download an installer from the...

If you manage multiple Ubuntu machines, you probably wish there were some way to download new packages only once and install them on every machine. Better still, it would be good if it worked totally transparently so you could just use the regular pa...

Ubuntu is built on Debian and uses the .deb package format to ensure that all software is installed in a consistent way. If you want to make your software really easy to install on Ubuntu, you need to know how to put it into a Debian package. ...

Software is generally installed on Ubuntu using binary packages that contain a precompiled copy of the program (the binary), but sometimes it can be useful to recompile the program yourself using custom options. To make that process easier, all offic...

Various Linux distributions use their own packaging schemes, and although there are a huge number of packages available directly within Ubuntu, there may be times you come across software that's available only in a package for Red Hat or some other d...

Ubuntu uses online package repositories to locate available software and then download it to your computer for installation. If you create your own Ubuntu packages, you can install them directly using dpkg [Hack #57], but that's not very convenient w...

While the usual approach to switching Linux distributions is to erase your disk and reinstall from scratch, Ubuntu is based on Debian, so it's possible to switch directly from one to the otherprovided you're willing to spend time tweaking and fixing ...