is the jessie/stretch aptitude broken?

[Gene Heskett]

Running an ayufan 5.15 version of a gnu-8 image on a rock64, I am getting
absolutely nowhere.

system is text only as the X11 stuffs has not yet been installed.

That leaves aptitude as the only menu driven package manager I believe.

Its no secret that I hate aptitude as its torn down to unbootable, 3
systems for me on selecting something and hitting g to install it.

But today, on this machine, running as a sudo -i root, I cannot get it to
mark something and admit its marked when I hit a g.

Whatintuncket am I doing wrong?

What steps do I need to do, to select the xfce task and install all its
deps?

Thanks.

[Paul Wise]

Post by Gene Heskett
Running an ayufan 5.15 version of a gnu-8 image on a rock64, I am getting
absolutely nowhere.

Do you mean to say Debian 8 instead of gnu-8?

It seems ayufan probably means one of these links:

https://github.com/ayufan
https://github.com/ayufan-rock64

Post by Gene Heskett
system is text only as the X11 stuffs has not yet been installed.
That leaves aptitude as the only menu driven package manager I believe.

There is also dselect but it doesn't have the friendliest of interfaces.

Probably you could also use synaptic via something like texttop :)

https://github.com/tombh/texttop

Post by Gene Heskett
Its no secret that I hate aptitude as its torn down to unbootable, 3
systems for me on selecting something and hitting g to install it.

Usually pressing g gives you a preview, where you can see if there are
any package removals. Only once you press g a second time to confirm
the changes will it do the install.

Post by Gene Heskett
But today, on this machine, running as a sudo -i root, I cannot get it to
mark something and admit its marked when I hit a g.

Hmm.

Post by Gene Heskett
What steps do I need to do, to select the xfce task and install all its
deps?

sudo apt install task-xfce-desktop

[Gene Heskett]

Post by Paul Wise

Post by Gene Heskett
Running an ayufan 5.15 version of a gnu-8 image on a rock64, I am
getting absolutely nowhere.

Do you mean to say Debian 8 instead of gnu-8?
https://github.com/ayufan
https://github.com/ayufan-rock64

Post by Gene Heskett
system is text only as the X11 stuffs has not yet been installed.
That leaves aptitude as the only menu driven package manager I believe.

There is also dselect but it doesn't have the friendliest of
interfaces.
Probably you could also use synaptic via something like texttop :)
https://github.com/tombh/texttop

Interestink, but it won't run on my amd64/phenom, and likely not on an
arm64 because theres zero mention of arm's.

Post by Paul Wise

Post by Gene Heskett
Its no secret that I hate aptitude as its torn down to unbootable, 3
systems for me on selecting something and hitting g to install it.

Usually pressing g gives you a preview, where you can see if there are
any package removals. Only once you press g a second time to confirm
the changes will it do the install.

Post by Gene Heskett
But today, on this machine, running as a sudo -i root, I cannot get
it to mark something and admit its marked when I hit a g.

Hmm.

Post by Gene Heskett
What steps do I need to do, to select the xfce task and install all
its deps?

sudo apt install task-xfce-desktop

I probably should have waited. I finally did get xfce marked along with
the xorg stuffs, and its been munching away on a 10 megabaud circuit for
around 3 hours, and claims it might be done in 5 or 6 more. One mistake
was having it install ALL the docs. I forgot theres quite a bit of docs
in languages this old fart can't even sneeze. OTOH, if I want to know
about something that might not be installed, maybe I can ask for the man
pages to see if its usefull. :) However its taken a 31GB sdcard that was
at 12% when I started to around 30% now, and its only gotten to the "m"s
so far. Sigh...

What I really want to do with these rock64's, is make a pi replacement
that I can run LCNC on, but that will take building an RT kernel,
something I've already done a couple times, and probably at least a
couple weeks putzing to convert LinuxCNC's rpspi.ko into rkspi.ko,
effectively makeing the pi version run on rock64 hardware. Anyway, once
this is done I should have enough of a gui that I can run
synaptic-pkexec. Like mice and men, thats the plan, which will let me
uninstall in one swell foop, all those docs in what are to me, strange
languages.

I didn't find "build-essential" in aptitude, so thats an RSN install too.

Thanks, marked important for later study.

[Paul Wise]

Post by Gene Heskett
that will take building an RT kernel

Debian already has RT Linux kernels, but unfortunately only for amd64/x86.

Post by Gene Heskett
I didn't find "build-essential" in aptitude, so thats an RSN install too.

If you want the aptitude interface, but already know what you want and
don't want to manually browse for it, use the visual preview option:

aptitude --visual-preview install build-essential

Also, you can search through automatically packages with the / key.
The search is based on regexes on filenames as well as having options
for searching on other attributes of packages.

aptitude search '?source-package(glibc)'

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/aptitude/ch02s04.en.html

[Gene Heskett]

Post by Paul Wise

Post by Gene Heskett
that will take building an RT kernel

Debian already has RT Linux kernels, but unfortunately only for amd64/x86.

Post by Gene Heskett
I didn't find "build-essential" in aptitude, so thats an RSN install too.

If you want the aptitude interface, but already know what you want and
aptitude --visual-preview install build-essential
Also, you can search through automatically packages with the / key.
The search is based on regexes on filenames as well as having options
for searching on other attributes of packages.
aptitude search '?source-package(glibc)'
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/aptitude/ch02s04.en.html

Thank you a lot, this is not well described in the man page. Bookmarked
FFR.