Packages:
How do they work?
Discover how Raspbian’s package manager,
apt-get
, gets software from online repositories
and manages it on your system.
If you’re used to Windows, you may be used to each bit of
software having its own installer, which gets the appropriate
files and puts them in the appropriate places.
Linux doesn’t work in the same way (at least,
it doesn’t usually). Instead, there is a part of
the operating system called the package
manager. This is responsible for getting
and managing any software you need. It
links to a repository of software so it can
download all the files for you. Since Linux
is built on open source software, almost
everything you will need is in the repositories
and free. You don’t need to worry about
finding the install files, or anything like that
– the package manager does it all for you.
There are a few different package
managers available for Linux, but the one
used by Raspbian is
apt-get
. Arch uses
a different one, so if you want to try this
distribution on your Raspberry Pi, you’ll
need to familiarize yourself with the
pacman
software, which we won’t cover here.
Before we get started, we should mention
that since this grabs software from the online
repositories, you will need to connect your Pi
to the internet before following this section.
16
Raspberry Pi User Guide.indd 16
08/07/2014 14:44
