For a lot of people, one of the first problems they encounter when switching to Ubuntu is that they don’t know how to install stuff. Granted there’s already a lot of stuff pre-installed from a fresh install of Ubuntu, here are some ways of installing programs starting from the easiest.
P.S. Yes I know I said I’ll be posting about iPod and Ubuntu. Don’t worry, we’re getting there.
Add/Remove Programs…
Click on Applications then on Add/Remove Programs…
The Add/Remove window will appear and you’ll be presented with a lot of applications that you can install, organized by category. You can quickly find an application by typing in the first few letters of its name (while the application list is focused), clicking on one of the categories to trim down the list, or by entering a few keywords in the search bar on top.
Tick the checkboxes of the applications you want to install and click Apply. After the applet downloads the package files and installs them, no questions asked (no pesky options which you’ll ignore and clcik Next anyway).
Synatic Package Manager
Installing GNOME Raw Thumbnailer via Synaptic
Synaptic functions much the same way as the Add Remove Programs, except it displays the packages themselves instead of the application. Most applications are composed of multiple packages, though you don’t have to worry about that because when you choose to install a package (ex. miro), it automatically prompts to install all the dependencies (packages which miro needs to run). Go ahead, try it for yourself. Oh, and as with the Add/Remove Programs method, there are still no pesky questions aside from the “Apply The Following Changes?” confirmation. Whereas the Add/Remove Programs… applet offers you a user-friendly interface to pimp out your Ubuntu box, Synaptic offers you a way of choosing specific packages to install (more often than not, instructions on the net will tell you specific packages to install), while still remaining relatively user-friendly.
Debian Packages (.deb files)
Installing the Skype .deb
This method is perhaps the most familiar to Windows users:
- Download the deb file (Win users might be more familiar with the term installer)
- Run the deb file
- Agree to the End User License Agreement (EULA)
- Select destination folder and click Next
- Select Full or Custom Install. If Custom, select the appropriate options.
- Click Install
My bad, there are no steps 3, 4, and 5.
Aptitude
Aptitude is the command-line utility used for installing packages. Now before you go dissing off Aptitude because it’s a terminal command, consider that when you’re installing a lot of programs at once (or following instructions off the net), it’s quite faster and easier to type (or paste) in the command-line sudo aptitude install blender miro mirthkit scummvm filelight deluge frozen-bubble than it is to find and select those 7 applications.
Source Code
When worse comes to worst, you can install most open source applications by performing the following steps:
- Downloading the source code (usually distributed as a .tar.gz file)
- Extracting it (Right-click > Extract here… or tar -xzf file.tar.gz)
- Entering the extracted folder via the terminal
- sudo aptitude install build-essential if you haven’t done so already
- Typing in ./configure
- Typing in make
- Typing in sudo make install
- If you want your program to be removable via Synaptic/Aptitude, use sudo checkinstall -D. This will create a package first before installing it.
A more thorough explanation of the compile process can be found eleswhere on the Internet. Just Google it.
A Word About Dependencies
One of the fundamental differences between programs in Unix/Mac/Linux and Windows is the way a program is packaged. As you install more and more applications, you’ll notice that fully-functional programs only use up a few kilobytes, sometimes only a few megabytes, and you might begin to wonder how Linux programs get to be so small when compared to their Windows counterparts.
This is because of one of the unwritten rules in writing programs for Linux, writing many small applications with a single purpose rather than 1 massive application that does many, allows many programs to use and share libraries or even other programs. These libraries or programs that an application uses are called dependencies. In Windows, save for a few Windows DLLs, each application needs to include everything in its installers (haven’t you ever wondered why you’d hardly find any CD installers for Linux?).
There is a term called dependency hell. I personally experienced this back when I was using Red Hat. It describes what happens when you have an application with several dependencies, where each dependency has a few more dependencies themselves or is dependent on a specific version of an application. Thankfully, the package manager for Ubuntu (and Debian for that matter) is very robust in automatically handling these dependencies for you.
If you found this information useful, buy me a coffee.
