[ Thanks to renai43 for this link.
]
“In this article I will try and bring to your attention one
simple Debian tool ‘apt’, which, I believe, reveals the general
Debian attitude towards their distribution, and the integration of
the Internet into that distribution….”
“Debian packages are called, appropriately enough, deb’s, and
the emphasis is very much upon building a stable distribution with
easy net access to a wide range of software. For example, when I
first installed Debian, I found I had a need for elementary web
browsing, and so I downloaded Netscape Communicator. The total
summary of commands I used to download and install Netscape was
“apt-get install communicator”. With this one command, I have told
Debian to look in the ‘/etc/apt/sources.list’ for the nearest
potato mirror, and download Netscape Communicator and all the
packages which it is dependant upon….”
“Unbelieveably, even upgrading your distribution is as
simple as a two line command. To upgrade from Debian 2.1 to
2.2, the procedure is to update your /etc/apt/sources.list to
reflect potato instead of ‘slink’ sources, from the same mirror,
and then type two commands – apt-get update, and apt-get
dist-upgrade. Sound simple? It sure is. Red Hat 7 users must be
kicking themselves as they consider the thorny upgrade path from
Red Hat 6.2.”