Aptitude

[Peter Garrett]

On Wed, 19 Apr 2006 14:57:59 -0400
Me - Atlantic <jdangler at atlantic.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 2006-04-19 at 10:46 +0100, Clive Menzies wrote:

[snip]
> > You may want to look at tasksel
> > 
[snip]
> > 
> Clive~
> man has no page; info has no info; locate turns up empty...
> i found a page at packages.ubuntulinux.org/breezy/base for tasksel.
> It's description says that it's for users who want to pick general tasks
> for installation on their Debian system.  It is used during the
> installation process but can be used at any other point.
> 
> It depends on Aptitude, debconf, and liblocale-gettext-perl.
> However, no online documentation as to its usage, syntax, etc.
> 
> Would I need to install this in order to see what it's supposed to be
> capable of?


Tasksel is pretty broad-brush. It gives you a few "tasks" like getting a
desktop/GUI, a mail server etc. - not exactly fine-grained ;)

The syntax? Well, there are a few options, but usually it is just invoked
as "tasksel", and pops up one of those curses-based dialogues so much used
in debian (debconf etc).

 $ tasksel --list-tasks
u desktop	Desktop environment
u web-server	Web server
i print-server	Print server
u dns-server	DNS server
u file-server	File server
u mail-server	Mail server
u database-server	SQL database

Not much to see here, move along...

Useful at install time on Debian perhaps, to avoid the horrible penance
 of wading through dselect (last time I looked at it was on Woody, I think)

apt-cache search <keywords> && install something  is to my mind a more
useful way to do things, but as they say, YMMV.

Peter



-- 

Linux User #343161