Linux Update Cheatsheet

DistroWatch offers a very nice cheatsheet on what basic commands the different flavors of linux use.  We’re talking the apt-get/yum/zypper stuff.

Source: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

The first table lists package management tasks in the four most popular distribution groups – Debian (including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, KNOPPIX, sidux and other Debian derivatives), openSUSE, Fedora (including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Scientific Linux and other Fedora-based distributions), and Mandriva Linux.

The second table lists package management utilities found in Slackware Linux and other Slackware-based distributions. As stated by Patrick Volkerding on several occasions, Slackware is unlikely to ever have any advanced (i.e. dependency-resolving) package management tool, so all installation, upgrade and removal tasks continue to be performed with pkgtools, a set of very simple scripts that haven’t changed much in years. Nevertheless, Slackware’s unsupported extra repository (available also on the installation DVD) does include slackpkg, a third-party package management tool that can be used for a more automated way of installing software on Slackware Linux. It’s worth noting that some popular Slackware derivatives, such as VectorLinux, have standardised on slapt-get, another third-party utility imitating the behaviour of Debian’s APT.

In the next group we have a few (mostly) independent distributions that have been gaining popularity in recent years. Sabayon Linux, although derived from Gentoo, has introduced its own command-line package management utility called equo. Arch Linux’s Pacman has been around for a long time and it’s often considered one of the fastest package management utilities around. Conary, developed by rPath and popularised by Foresight Linux, is a completely new approach to package management, created by well-known ex-Red Hat engineers with many years of package management experience. In contrast, PiSi by Pardus Linux is a relatively new utility, but the distribution itself has been growing fast in the last couple of years.

Besides standard package management utilities that most distributions use as part of their systems, there are also some distro-agnostic ones that have been deployed with various levels of success in certain distributions. Smart, originally developed by Conectiva, hasn’t been in the news lately, but some users seem to prefer it over Mandriva’s urpmi or openSUSE’s zypper (it also supports Debian and Slackware-based systems). More recently it is Fedora’s PackageKit that has been gaining momentum as a way to manage packages across distributions and architectures. Now included in many other distributions, PackageKit’s pkgcon command-line utility is effectively a unified front-end to the native package management tools of Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva and other distributions.

Finally, a table for source-based distributions. Gentoo‘s Portage is well-documented and widely used, but other distributions that are designed to be built from scratch don’t often feature in the Linux media, so their package management systems are not particularly well-known. Sorcerer, which existed even before Gentoo Linux was conceived, uses Bash scripts to “cast spells” or download, install and compile packages. Sorcerer was later forked into Lunar Linux and Source Mage GNU/Linux, both of which are included in the table below. Unfortunately, Sorcerer doesn’t offer much in terms of online documentation so it has been omitted for now.