Adept manager& Add/Remove programs question ( SOLVED)

[Linuxgirl]

In my quest to set up wireless connection I stumbled on this:

Are Adept Manager and Add/Remove programs synchronised and interchangeable? I noticed that in Add/Remove Knetworkmanager is listed as installed, whereas Adept displays it as not installed. If I click the icon it just says "Knetworkmanager is not running" and if I run it through alt+F2 a konsole window appears (no text).

So, is Knetworkmanger there or not? And which of the two programs should I use so that there will be no more discrepancies?

[Snowhog]

Re: Adept manager& Add/Remove programs question

Add/Remove (Adept Installer) is a 'user friendly' GUI that organizes packages into categories, making it easier for the novice to locate packages by function (Games, etc). Both Add/Remove (Adept Installer) and Adept Manager utilize the same package cache, and reflect the same status on displayed packages. The name you see in Add/Remove isn't always the same as the actual package(s) it was installed from.

The package knetworkmanger (as listed in Adept Manager) is not the actual application:

knetworkmanger

KDE systray applet for controlling NetworkManager

This is a dummy package to depend on network-manager-kde for upgrades, it can be safely removed.

network-manager-kde

KDE systray applet for controlling NetworkManager

systray applet for controlling network connections managed by NetworkManager.

[Rog131]

Re: Adept manager& Add/Remove programs question

List all installed packages:

:~$ dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall

Is knetworkmanager installed:

dpkg --get-selections | grep knetworkmanager

:~$

=> that means no

Is network-manager-kde installed:

dpkg --get-selections | grep network-manager-kde

network-manager-kde install

=> Yes it is.


Is process knetworkmanager running:

ps -e | grep knetworkmanager

9921 ? 00:00:00 knetworkmanager

=> Yes it is, id is 9921.


Package Managers

APT HOWTO
Chapter 1 - Introduction
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch1.en.html

In the beginning there was the .tar.gz. Users had to compile each program that they wanted to use on their GNU/Linux systems. When Debian was created, it was deemed necessary that the system include a method of managing the packages installed on the machine. The name dpkg was given to this system.

A new dilemma quickly took hold of the minds of the makers of GNU/Linux. They needed a rapid, practical, and efficient way to install packages that would manage dependencies automatically and take care of their configuration files while upgrading. Here again, Debian led the way and gave birth to APT, the Advanced Packaging Tool

Graphical package managers

Adept
Adept is a GUI to the Advanced Packaging Tool for KDE. Adept is developed by Peter Ročkai and is sponsored by Canonical Ltd. through the Kubuntu project.

Synaptic
Synaptic is a graphical package management program for apt. It provides the same features as the apt-get command line utility with a GUI front-end based on Gtk+.


And there is also:

Aptitude
A highly configurable console front-end for Debian APT. Aptitude is a text-based interface to the Debian GNU/Linux package system.

Smart Package Manager (smartpm)
An alternative package manager that works with dpkg/rpm
The Smart Package Manager project has the ambitious objective of
creating smart and portable algorithms for solving adequately the
problem of managing software upgrading and installation. This tool
works in all major distributions (APT, APT-RPM, YUM, URPMI, etc).


dpkg/apt is base of all package management in the Kubuntu (K/X/Ubuntu is Debian based distribution).

[tiger99]

Suggestion about package management

As stated above, the Debian/Ubuntu/Kubuntu package managers are all compatible, so I have found it useful to install Synaptic on Kubuntu. This can of course be done from Adept, and it adds a few Gnome libraries etc to make it work.

The reason I do that is because Adept sometimes breaks, and if that happens it is nice to have a GUI tool available to re-install it.

But some things are most readily done from the command line, if you have a shell open. For instance

sudo apt-get install firefox

will get firefox installed quicker than firing up a GUI tool for one package, of which you know the name.

You can also download a .deb from a suitable source, and right click it, and open with Gdebi Package Installer.

All different ways of doing the same thing, and only a matter of convenience. None is inherently better than the others. They all work properly within the Debian dpkg system which is what matters.

But the thing to avoid at all costs is Automatix, and similar installers, which are not integrated into the dpkg/apt system, and always result in things breaking badly, sooner or later. The cause is not always correctly identified, because the problems usually start after a properly executed dpkg/apt/adept/synaptic update, which can't know of the inconsistent changes already made to the system by Automatix.

Hopefully this will avoid much misery. Debian package management is very good indeed, when not messed up by incompatible tools.

[Linuxgirl]

Re: Adept manager& Add/Remove programs question

Thank you gentlemen,

I figured things out thanks to you, and tiger99, thanks for the warning about Automatix - I was thinking of installing it (someone somewhere mentioned that it's a great package manager) but thanks to you I changed my mind and installed Synaptic instead.

Hopefully someday I will be able to return the favor, and if not to you, maybe to some other newbie lost in Linux space