Apt-get - A Substitute For The Emerge Linux Cmd.

[Twinbee]

For those of you installing the Gentoo linux distro because of the emerge command, i'm sorry to tell you that you can do it with any distro. ^_^

A program called apt-get is around, which does exactly the same thing as emerge. You simply type 'apt-get install xine' and it downloads all dependencies and all files needed to run Xine, etc.

Now WHY couldn't I have found this earlier!

 

[Akuma no Houkon]

Apt is hardly a replacement for emerge. For one it only does binaries, where as emerge does source code. For another it doesnt really do depenancies that well (or at all?) I would always get dependancy warnings when using Apt.

And the Apt repositories I have seen dont even come close to the variety of programs that my portage tree (emerge) has. Most of the programs I want to get, are not in any Apt repositories (and I have many on my list).

Not that its a bad program, for those without emerge its great (and I always had it installed in other distros) but you will need the majority of the needed dependancies for it to work properly.

 

[Twinbee]

That's not the case. It handles dependencies aswell. I've just updated Gaim, xmame and xine through it and it's worked perfectly whereas gaim refused to compile with the source code.

 

[woogal]

For one it only does binaries

'apt-get source...' will download source

For another it doesnt really do depenancies that well (or at all?)

Dependancies was the reason why apt was invented. It may not work too well on distros that have tried to force apt onto their fairly pathetic rpm based systems, but on debian it performs perfectly (as long as you use it as it was designed to be used and don't try to mix testing and unstable sources )

 

[Akuma no Houkon]

It may not work too well on distros that have tried to force apt onto their fairly pathetic rpm based systems

Why dont you just come out and say RedHat ?

'apt-get source...' will download source

Will it download the source for the app, all its dependancies, compile and install them all, into a protected sandbox, until everything is tested and finished, then move it over to your live system? Thats what Emerge does.

Dependancies was the reason why apt was invented.

Hmm, I am going from memeory, I havent used Apt in awhile, even when I was on a non emerge system, but I can remember lots of dependency hell with it. It could be that the dependancies certain apps required, were not in the repositories I had. Therefor it couldnt "do its job".

 

[Twinbee]

I'm using Redhat and it's working flawlessly so far.

 

[Rico]

Apt is hardly a replacement for emerge.

Apt offers almost exactly the same functionality. I actually much prefer the binaries. Meanwhile, enjoy spending a day or two compiling OpenOffice and KDE...

 

[Akuma no Houkon]

Apt is hardly a replacement for emerge.

Apt offers almost exactly the same functionality. I actually much prefer the binaries. Meanwhile, enjoy spending a day or two compiling OpenOffice and KDE...

I have never had very much luck with Apt. Never liked it that much, Emerge has a lot of functionality and I enjoy it much more than apt.

I compile nearly everything from source, I like to know that its optimised, and with gentoo's USE flags, its great (although a few things like openoffice dont really get optimised so binaries are just as good).

KDE doesnt take _that_ long, like 6 hours only. Sure it will take 15 hours if you dont have XFree86 or any of the other huge dependancies that KDE requires, but if you have all of those already, then its not that long, and the optimisations are well worth it.

 

[Rico]

Hmm, agreed that the USE flags are invaluable but my PC is generally good enough to run apps without going past 5% of its CPU usage, so I never really notice the optimisations when I do end up compiling from source (I'm a gentoo user also), especially with 2.6.

I just feel that it would be annoying if source was the only option and you wanted to try an application right away; the upgrade compiles would get annoying.

 

[Akuma no Houkon]

I multitask on such a large scale, (a game running in a window, vmware in another window, xmms playing in the background, kdevelop open for my dev, firefox running, a terminal usually doing 'something', a few instances of a doc viewer for notes, help files, readme's, maybe a download going in the background, xChat and an IM or two sitting idle. gkrellm just doing what it does, etc...) And then to top it all off my wife likes to popup at random times wanting to use the PC for a few mins (her own IM's, firefox instances,etc...) and I dont want to close all my shite, so I spirit them away to a new desktop (multiple desktops are a godsend)

So needless to say, even with an AMD XP 2600 with gentoo compiled specifically for my CPU, using an optimised 2.6.5 kernel, I still can notice that little bit of extra optimization. Or, more importantly, the wife fails to notice all the cpu cycles I am taking up with my junk idling in the background

Its not a huge difference, but its enough for me

Even if there wasnt more than a %1 cpu difference total, I still like knowing that the software on my PC is optimized to my exact setup.