Ubuntu 7.04, or Feisty Fawn as it’s known to it’s friends, has added a neat upgrade to the apt-get tool. For those who don’t know, apt-get is the tool Ubuntu uses to install and remove software. A small problem in the past has been trying to figure out what the name of the package required was.
In Feisty Fawn, if you try to run a command that isn’t installed a small message will be displayed telling you how to install it! The software has to be in your repository, so typing notepad and expecting it to tell you to apt-get install windows isn’t going to happen!
This morning I needed to update my local WPMU work area so …
$ svn update
The program 'svn' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install subversion
apt-get moo still works too! 
6 Comments
Sean on May 28, 2007 at 4:21 pm.
Pretty cool.:)
(The program ‘banshee’ is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install banshee
Make sure you have the ‘universe’ component enabled
bash: banshee: command not found)
Donncha (1707 comments.) on May 28, 2007 at 6:52 pm.
That is cool. I already have that repository enabled so I didn’t know it did that too!
Barry (3 comments.) on May 29, 2007 at 8:32 am.
You would think that they would just ask if you would like to install the package (y/n) rather than asking you to re-type the entire command. Maybe in the next release…
El Baby on May 29, 2007 at 4:46 pm.
Cool idea… as for what Barry proposes, I think it’s “A very Bad Idea”(TM)… it’d be over-intrusive and may brake working shell scripts (that may catch errors internally) by asking for input where it shouldn’t.
Cody (3 comments.) on June 1, 2007 at 12:28 am.
I have found this upgrade to be immensely useful. Being a relative Linux-newbie, getting hints on what to install to run a certain command is very nice indeed.
fredth on December 6, 2008 at 10:40 pm.
How can I turn that off?
Mor often thatn not, it’s just a typo.
Program friefox isnot installed…
I don’t need those suggestions, so how can I turn them off?