Hi !
I am Red Hat user. This is the first time I install Debian. There are 4000 packages to choose from during the new intallation. How can I list the entire package. Debian is not like Red Hat which I can choose the package and press F2 (for description) of the packages or modules install.

Please advise how to list all the package in Debian 3.

Regards,
x2000koh

The way I find a package discription, as well as a list of packages is to goto http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

There is a search of all packages on the main mirror. I hope that this is of help to you.

You should have the APT system installed. If you don't, the first thing you should do is get the .deb file for that.

If/When you do have APT, learn apt-get and apt-cache really well, they will be some of your better friends on debian.

Springboard:
"apt-cache search <searchstr>" will return all the packages you have available to you matching <searchstr>

"apt-get install <packagename>" will install the package of your choosing, unless you have dependency problems.


If you're interested, a developing project is the Synaptic APT program. It's a little undeveloped, but provides a friendlier interface, at the least.

Caidence has you on the right track IMO. I also use 'apt-cache showpkg <package_name>' which is the only command that I know of that shows reverse dependancies. If you want the package description 'dpkg -p <package_name>' works. If you want to see all the files that was installed by a package try 'dpkg -L <package_name> | less' Aptitude is another apt front end you may want to check out (it's a tad lighter than Synaptic and it even claims to be non-fattening, naturally cleansing, and housebroken ).

During an install I choose not to install anything other than the base system. No tasksel and I never use dselect (I do not like that it's default behavior that is to install recomended packages, which always ends up installing a lot of packages I don't want). After I get the system up for the first time I'm off to apt-get what I want. Sometimes I'll use aptitude.