Manage Packages with Adept

Manage Packages with Adept

Adept is the KDE equivalent of Synaptic, allowing you to manage packages on a Kubuntu system.

Ubuntu's package-management tools are some of its greatest strengths. A huge amount of work has been put into the underlying management code in order to make it as flexible as possible, separating the user interface from the code that performs the actual heavy lifting. The result is that there are many different ways to interact with apt, allowing you to manage packages from the command line [Hack #54] in a variety of ways or use one of many graphical frontends that hides the details from you and provides a point-and-click GUI. This approach allows graphical frontends to be relatively lightweight: they don't need to include basic package-management logic because all of that is provided by apt itself, which in turn makes the GUI application simpler and more robust.

Adept is a graphical package-management interface that sits on the libapt API and uses the Qt libraries, making it an ideal alternative to Synaptic for Kubuntu systems. You can use it to install, upgrade, and remove packages, of course, but it also comes with a couple of little extra utilities to make your life easier: adept-notifier and adept-updater.

Basic Adept Usage

If you don't already have it installed, use the command line or an alternative package-management tool to install Adept:

$ sudo apt-get install adept libqt-perl
            

The reason for installing libqt-perl is that it enables some extra features in Adept, including the ability to configure and reconfigure packages directly.

Launch Adept from K menuAdept. The main management window is quite similar to Synaptic but includes some interesting additional features, such as Debtags support, shown in Figure.

Package management with Adept

Debtags is an initiative to associate specific keywords with packages, rather than rely on searching package titles and descriptions to find what you want. It's a lot like the tags used for free-form taxonomy by Flickr and various blogging tools. You can browse through the currently available tags at the bottom right of the window, and drag them into the Tags I Want and Tags I Do Not Want boxes to restrict package search results. For example, if you don't want to see any GNOME packages listed in search results, just browse through the tags to the "GTK user interface" tag and drop it on Tags I Do Not Want.

The search system is dynamic, so you can just start typing search terms, and the list of packages will be narrowed automatically (see Figure). Then you can click the triangle next to a package name to see a description of the package and a Request Install button to install it. If the package is already installed, the button will say Request Removal instead.

Adept package search

Installation and removal of packages doesn't happen immediately. Instead, flags are set on the packages, and when you are happy with the changes you have made to package selections, you can click the Apply Changes button at the top of the window.

Adept also allows you to modify the list of software repositories used by your computer to fetch new packages. You can manually modify the list of package repositories directly [Hack #60], or go to ViewAfter making any changes to the repositories, click the Fetch Updates button at the top of the window to force Adept to fetch the latest package lists.

Adept also provides a convenient Full Upgrade button that finds and marks all packages on your system that have upgrades available, so a quick way to keep your entire system up-to-date is to open Adept, click Fetch Updates, then Full Upgrade, and then Apply Changes.

Receive Update Notifications Automatically

Updated software packages are released quite frequently, and if you want to stay on top of the latest security updates, it's important to know when updates are available. Instead of manually updating the package list every day and checking for new software, you can just use the adept-notifier panel applet to keep you informed.

adept-notifier sits in your system tray and regularly checks the package repositories for new releases. If there are no updates to install, it gives you a green light in the panel, but if new versions of any software you have installed become available, it pops up a notification message to let you know. That way you can get on with just using your computer and not worry about checking for updates manually.

Adept Updater is a convenient way to apply updates to all your currently installed packages. Launch it by going to K menuAdept Updater, and then click the big Fetch Updates button at the bottom. You will see progress as the latest package lists are retrieved, as shown in Figure.

Adept Updater

If any packages need to be updated, you will then be given the option of downloading and applying those updates.