Synaptic ======== Synaptic is a graphical package management program for apt. It provides the same features as the apt-get command line utility with a GUI front-end based on Gtk+ or WINGs. Synaptic was developed by Alfredo K. Kojima from Connectiva. His last offical released was 0.16. I took over his CVS version, where he added a nearly complette port to Gtk+. I completted the port and add some new features. See the NEWS file for the user visible changes from that point on. Connectiva is still supporting the development of synaptic. Gustavo Niemeyer is a active developer of synaptic. If you want to use synaptic from the gnome menu, you should use gksu (default) to obtain root privileges. Get it from gksu from http://www.nongnu.org/gksu/. Synaptic can display a "Pkg Help" button on debian systems. If you have installed and configured dwww, a help will be display and if you click on it, a browser is opend. It is also possible on debian systems to reconfigure debconf packages. This is done with the help of libgnome2-perl that needs to be installed. On a debian system, you can have more than one "release" in your sources.list file. You can choose which one to use in the "expert" tab in the preferences dialog. All development is done at http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/synaptic Tutorial: --------- Synaptic is used very much like apt-get. Usually you do a "update" which will update the package list from the servers in your sources.list file. Note that no packages are updated in this step, only information about the packages. Now you can view what packages are "upgradeable". To do this, just click on the filter "Upgradeable". The main list will change and you will see only those packages where a new version is available on the server. You can now upgrade inidiviual packages by selecting them and then clicking on the small "upgrade" button on the left (or double click in the gtk-version) or thos to upgrade all packages by clicking on the big "Upgrade" button on the top. No packages will downloaded/upgraded yet, they are only marked as to be upgraded. You may want to change the filter again to "Expected Changes" to see what will happen if you continue. If you like what you see, click "Proceed!" and synaptic will download the packages and install them. Filters: -------- Synaptic display the main package list according to the filter you selected. The most simple filter is of course "All packages". But there are much more filters than that :) You can view the predefiend filters and make your own filters by clicking on "Filters" above the main package list. Keybindings: ------------ From version 0.20 on, the gtk has some global keybings: * ALT-k keep * ALT-i install * ALT-r remove * ALT-u Update individual package * ALT-l Update Package List * ALT-g upgrade * ALT-d DistUpgrade * ALT-p proceed * CTRL-f find Command line options: --------------------- From version 0.25 on, synaptic supports the following command line options: '-f ' or "--filter-file " = give a alternative filter file '-i ' or "--initial-filter " = start with filter nr. '-r' = open repository screen on startup '-o