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The original command, as written, works fine. Aptitude does have an interactive mode, but when run with arguments like that, will behave approximately the same

by tene 14y ago

The original command, as written, works fine. Aptitude does have an interactive mode, but when run with arguments like that, will behave approximately the same as apt-get would. Aptitude acts as a frontend to several of the slightly-lower-level apt tools.

orangethirty 14y ago
It didn't work for this lazy copy/paste user. :) Ubuntu 11.10. Just posted what worked for me. No harm intended.
moreati 14y ago
Recent versions of Ubuntu don't have aptitude installed out of the box, not sure if 12.10 brought it back
loevborg 14y ago
Aptitude is no longer pre-installed in current versions of Ubuntu (and Debian). Also, aptitude used to be recommended over apt-get because its handling of dependencies was superior and because it made it easier to find "orphan" packages. As I understand it, apt-get has since caught up with aptitude and is nowadays the preferred command-line tool.
- YokoZar 14y ago
  More importantly, aptitude is known to be broken. Aptitude's resolver never caught up with Ubuntu's multiarch transition, and will erroneously conclude that many things are uninstallable (or attempt to "fix" things by uninstalling half the system)
  - eeperson 14y ago
    It looks like this has since been fixed: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/aptitude/+bug/831768 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/aptitude/+bug/8317...
- eeperson 14y ago
  I know Ubuntu has strongly preferred apt-get for a while. However, I thought Debian still recommended both tools and had aptitude installed by default.