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Installing Software Packages

In this lesson we'll learn about the package management system of Ubuntu. We'll learn how to keep packages updated and install new packages from the package manager.

Refresher

We'll use some concepts here that was learned in the previous lesson. You can take a quick look at them to refresh them:

In Linux, different distributions have different ways of managing software packages. These packages consist of Audio/Video drivers, Linux Kernel, System-level packages, and user-level software like media/games/editors/browsers etc. To manage these packages, we use something called Package Managers. They are small utilities that help in downloading software from Repositories and regularly update them.

In this course, we are using a Ubuntu-based droplet, which comes with an Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) package manager. With apt you can add/remove packages or update existing ones and even upgrade across Ubuntu versions.

Our task for this lesson is to install a tool called fortune. fortune is a very old, popular and entertaining utility. The tool does exactly what the name says - it prints random fortune cookies to the terminal.

Step 1: Update software repositories

Before we install any package, we must ensure that our package repository is up-to-date. The APT package index is a database of all packages under each repository.

When a package gets updated, we need to update our local index before we can install the latest package versions. To do that, run the following command:

$ sudo apt-get update

After running the above command our package list got updated. However, our software packages haven't been upgraded, only the details of new versions present in the package index have been updated. We need to run apt-get upgrade which will upgrade all the older packages in our system to their latest versions as present in the package index.

Step 2: Installing packages

Now that we learnt how to keep our package repositories updated, it's time for us to install the package fortune-mod from the Ubuntu repository.

NOTE: The name of the package is fortune-mod in the APT repository, however the actual name of the command is fortune.

$ sudo apt-get install fortune-mod

We can verify that it's installed by running the command fortune:

$ fortune
Is this happening?

NOTE: Since fortune prints a random message every time you run, it's completely normal for you to see an output different than above.

Congrats! You learnt how to update packages and even install one yourself. Here's an exercise for you:

Task

Install the famous utility cowsay and print this message "I like learning new things". The output would look something similar to:

$ cowsay I like learning new things
 ____________________________
< I like learning new things >
 ----------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||