Process of installation, deletion and update the software configuration in the operating system using a pre-prepared packages.
Questions tagged [package-management]
405 questions
24
votes
5 answers
How does Windows handle program dependencies?
I have used Linux for quite a while, and I always wondered how Windows was able to handle the programs depedencies like apt-get, aptitude, Pacman, yum and other package managers are able to. Sometimes, my package manager would tell me that this…

Nico
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20
votes
2 answers
Debian/Ubuntu - How to restore /var/cache/apt structure after deleting it?
I was running out of space on an Ubuntu server, so I did this command to save space
sudo rm -rf /var/cache/apt/archives
However now when trying to do things with apt, I get the following errors:
E: Could not open lock file…

Amandasaurus
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19
votes
4 answers
What does Alpine's APK stands for?
Alpine Linux uses apk as its package manager, and its installer files are .apk... Just like Android files are.
Are those related in any way? If yes, how?
If not, what does APK stands for (Alpine PacKage?), and why they choose the same name for their…

igorsantos07
- 620
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18
votes
4 answers
Best practice for proxying package repositories
I have a collection of CentOS servers in my corporate network. For security reasons, most servers do not have general outbound internet access unless it is a core functional requirement for the server.
This creates a challenge when I need to update…

Dave Smith
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17
votes
2 answers
How can I install packages without starting their associated services?
As you're probably aware, by default when you install a package on a Debian or Ubuntu based system, if the package contains a service, that service will generally be enabled and started automatically when you install the package.
This is a problem…

Michael Hampton
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17
votes
5 answers
How to check when yum update was last run
Is there a canonical way to find out the last time that yum update was run on a system?
Our set up is that we have staging servers that run automatic updates, and provided they don't fall over, we will manually update our production servers about…

Hamish Downer
- 9,420
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16
votes
5 answers
install the same debian packages on another system
How do I export a list of installed Debian packages on a system, and then install those same packages on a new system?

jes5199
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16
votes
3 answers
How to install two packages that write the same file
I have two packages that each create /usr/bin/ffprobe. One of them is ffmpeg from the Deb Multimedia repository, while the other is ffmbc 0.7-rc5 built from source. The hand-rolled one is business-critical, and we used to just install it from source…

Joel E Salas
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16
votes
4 answers
Debian: How to use "apt-get install" without upgrading dependencies?
I already have a package B and want to install a new package A. The installation wants to modify B, but I don't want that to happen.
I need to install the package A.
It has the a dependency on package B and requires to be (>2.0).
I have already…

victorgp
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16
votes
3 answers
Debian: How do I check the last time package upgrades/updates were run?
I want to know when we last ran the package upgrades/updates on our Debian server.
user18233
15
votes
7 answers
FLOSS Server management and audit tools
I've been working with HP's Server Automation tool suite for a long time, and while it's a great tool - it's too much for a small business or home network to use (more accurately: it's way too expensive for anything less than a large company to…

warren
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14
votes
4 answers
Installed software from source, how to say yum not to install it from package?
On a CentOS 7, I've installed foobar version 2, compiled from sources.
How can I make yum aware of that install so it won't install foobar version 1 for dependency?
Installation of foobar
$ git clone https://example.com/foobar.git
[...]
$ cd…

YSC
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14
votes
2 answers
Good practice regarding multiple package management systems
Some programming languages come with their own package management system, for instance, in the case of R, the built-in install.packages command installs from the CRAN repository and deals with dependencies.
In parallel, OS come with their own…

bli
- 243
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14
votes
5 answers
Compute a list of difference between packages installed on two hosts
I just add some problems with my Debian virtual servers and I add to reinstall all of them from scratch. However, I still had access to the old version and I could retrieve the list of installed packages.
In order to facilitate the process of…

krtek
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14
votes
5 answers
How do I find the package that contains a given program on Ubuntu?
Frequently I know the name of the command line program that I need but I don't know the name of the package that provides the program. How do I find the name of the package that contains the program that I need? On RPM based systems they have the…

ejunker
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