Install Software Packages for Debian

dpkg -i [package]

Installing new software is one of the most fun things you can do with a Linux machine. As you'll learn in upcoming sections, Debian has apt, the most powerful and easiest-to-use system for installing software of any Linux distribution. As powerful as apt is, much of it is a wrapper around the dpkg program (in the same way yum is a wrapper around rpm), which does the grunt work of installing and removing software on a Debian-based machine. Before learning how to use apt, you should learn how to use dpkg because apt can't be used to install everything.

Here's a case in point: One of the most popular Voice over IP (VoIP) programs out now is Skype. Due to licensing issues, however, Skype isn't included in the default installs of most distributions. If you want Skype, you have to first download it from the company's site, and then manually install it. To get Skype, head over to the Linux download page, at www.skype.com/products/skype/linux, and find the package for your distribution. In this case, you're going to use the Debian package, which at this time is named skype_1.2.0.18-1_i386.deb.

After the .deb file is downloaded onto your system, it's time to install it. First use cd to change directories to the directory that contains the .deb file, and then use dpkg to install it.

Note

On most Debian-based distributions, this and all other dpkg commands are run as root. The wildly popular K/Ubuntu distribution, however, doesn't use root. Instead, commands normally run as root are prefaced with sudo. In other words, Debian would use this:

# dpkg -i skype_1.2.0.18-1_i386.deb 

K/Ubuntu and other sudo-based distributions would instead use this:

$ sudo dpkg -i skype_1.2.0.18-1_i386.deb 

This book was written using several machines running K/Ubuntu, so if you see sudo instead of root, now you know why.

# ls skype_1.2.0.18-1_i386.deb # dkpg -i skype_1.2.0.18-1_i386.deb sudo dpkg -i skype_1.2.0.18-1_i386.deb Selecting previously deselected package skype. (Reading database ... 97963 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking skype (from skype_1.2.0.18-1_i386.deb) ... Setting up skype (1.2.0.18-1) ... 

That's it. The dpkg command is a model of brevity, telling you the important information and nothing more.