Book Image

Learning Raspbian

By : William Harrington
Book Image

Learning Raspbian

By: William Harrington

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Learning Raspbian
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Methods of installing software


There are several different ways to install software on your Raspberry Pi. These include:

  • apt-get

  • GUI Package Manager

  • Aptitude

  • Raspberry Pi Store

  • The source

All of these methods, with the exception of installing from source code, use APT and dpkg to install the software package.

dpkg

dpkg is a software application at the center of Raspbian's software package management system. It is a software tool that actually installs a software package from a .deb file.

A .deb file contains three different parts:

  • A Debian-binary file that contains the version of dpkg needed to install the package

  • A control archive that has all the information needed to install the package

  • A data archive that contains the actual software itself

dpkg reads the .deb file and determines whether all of the required software is installed. If the required software isn't installed, it will let you know what the required software is.

APT

The APT is a frontend tool that makes using dpkg a lot easier. It is preconfigured...