Identifying Software Packages

Most major Linux distributions have in common the concept of a packagea prebuilt bundle of software ready to be installed on your system. Despite the numerous distributions out there, most use the same package management systems. They often have different ways of dealing with them, but the packaging system remains pretty consistent. Most distributions these days use either the RPM format of packages or DEB. Because it is based on Debian, Ubuntu Linux uses DEB format packages.

Assume that I am talking about a hypothetical package called ftl_transport. If I were looking for this package to install on my Ubuntu system, I would find it in this type of format:

 ftl-transport_2.1-1_i386.deb 

The first part is the package name itself. The numbers just after the underscore (and just before the hyphen) indicate the software version number. The number following the hyphen is the package release number. Following that is the architecture for which the package was compiled (i386, in this case). The final prefix, .deb, is a dead giveaway that this is a Debian package, sometimes referred to as a DEB.