[mdlug] Ubuntu Server administration

[Michael S. Mikowski]

On Monday 24 August 2009 11:32:44 am Michael ORourke wrote:
> Yep, I found aptitude when I was poking around in the docs.  Sounds like a
> pretty cool package management tool.  Thanks for the info.  However, I
> really like the flexibility that YAST offers from both a GUI and command
> line perspective.  It's really handy when you do system administration on
> SuSE boxes and you know what you want to do, but might have forgotten the
> syntax or what-not, so you pull up YAST and navigate through the menu items
> till you find what you want to do.  IMHO it is really the 'Swiss Army
> Knife' of system administration tools.
>
> -Mike
>

For a command-line Swiss Army Knife, you may want to try Wajig.

$ wajig list-installed # list all installed packages
$ sudo wajig detail tofrodos # list all details about tofrodos
$ sudo wajig list-all # list all packages

Utilities I rarely use, but find very useful when I need them, are:

$ sudo wajig fix-missing
$ sudo wajig fix-install
$ sudo wajig fix-configure

Try $ sudo wajig list-commands for all available commands

Wajig wraps a number of debian utilities into a single command-line interface.


Also handy on Debian systems is apt-file.  You can use it to:

* Find what package owns any file, e.g:
  $ apt-file find /usr/bin/dos2unix
     tofrodos: /usr/bin/dos2unix

* What files come from any given package:
  $ apt-file show tofrodos

As of Kubuntu 9.04 with the KDE 4.3 updates, kpackage kit is the GUI.  So far, 
I have seen little trouble with it.

Hope that helps!

Cheers, Mike