[olug] Debian: List installed packages

[Jeff Hinrichs]

Christopher Cashell said:
> At Fri, 21 Nov 03, Unidentified Flying Banana Jeff Hinrichs, said:
>> I am giving Deb a whirl and I can't figure out how to list the
>> installed packages.  In RH I'd do a RPM -qa, what is the equivalent
>> for apt?
>
> There's a couple of ways[1] you can do it. . . The easiest is 'dpkg -l',
> though 'dpkg --get-selections' can be helpful, too.  The former can be
> used for searching (although 'apt-cache search' is generally better for
> that), while the latter produces information that can be used in other
> ways (such as cloning the package setup of a system).
>
> You can also run 'dselect'[1], 'aptitude', or one of the other available
> Package managers, and get a listing of packages. ;-)
>
> Those can generally show you what packages are available.
>
>> Jeff
>
>  [1] dselect has a reputation for being terse, unfriendly, unintuitive,
>      and generally unpleasant.  Strangely enough, I generally like the
> program.  I've had few problems with it myself, and while I have a
> few minor issues with it, I find it to be an extremely useful and
> powerful tool
> --
Outstanding. Thanks to all for the answers you provided.

I have one more question.  We loaded Deb 3 stable and then updated.  It
updated the kernel from 2.2 to 2.4, however I had to boot in to safe mode
a number of times to get lilo straightened out.  I finally got the 2.4
kernel to load.  My question is, are kernel updates on Deb always this
messy?  Will I always need to futz with lilo.conf and finally run lilo to
update the boot  info?  Maybe I am spoiled but starting with the 7.x
versions of RH it handled the necessary lilo config and when you manually
edited lilo.conf it was not necessary to run lilo afterwards.  RH somehow
just knew it was changed and took care of updating the boot info.

Don't I sound like a whiner?<g>

-Jeff