Raspberry Pi, 2nd Edition

Manage Your Software with apt-get

Now that you have Debian set up, you probably want to add more software. Back in the old days, it was difficult to install new software on Linux systems. Usually you had to download a program’s source code and compile and install it yourself. If the program depended on other projects or libraries, you learned about it when the compiler or the linker spat out some nasty error messages, and then you had to resolve the dependencies yourself—you had to download, compile, and install even more programs, and so on.

Fortunately, those days are long gone; all modern Linux distributions come with a package manager that automates the whole process of downloading and installing new software. Not only do package managers ...