2. Downloading Files and Packages
This guide was written several years ago and has not yet been updated. You may encounter outdated information.
Please note that the information in this guide is not applicable to all Linux distributions.
Downloading files
In Linux there are two main utilities for downloading files, and both have a very similar sort of syntax. The go-to for downloading files is wget, it is avaliable on (allmost all) Linux distributions as well as windows.
To use wget, simply type wget [url of file/page].
This will reach out to the website using http/s and download the file into the current working directory.
There is another command that works for downloading files called curl. curl is different to wget as it’s default place to ‘save’ the file is the standard output (displayed on the terminal). To change this we can use the command curl [url of file/page] -o /path/to/save/file
Downloading packages
Packages are basically the applications and libraries that your computer can use. Package managers automate downloading, installing and also updating all of your packages for you in a simple and relatively intuative way (It’s a lot better than how Windows manages installing software).
Your package manager normally depends on what distribution of Linux you have installed. For example Ubuntu uses the apt package manager, a relatively common package manager.
I’ll start off with installing packages on Ubuntu, as it’s the most common distribution. Like I said earlier, Ubuntu uses apt to install packages. Before apt can install packages, it needs to update a list of avaliable applications it can install. To do this we type sudo apt update. Once apt has fetched the list of avaliable packages, we can install a package with sudo apt install [package name] then press y to install the package. We can also update all the currently installed packages with sudo apt upgrade, again we need to press y to continue with the installation.
If you want to find packages and how to install them on your distribution, you can head over to command-not-found.com, the website allows you to search for packages based on the command, for example the ls command is part of the coreutils package.
Installing packages manually
Manually installing packages means that you have to type some extra commands to install them, and you have to maintian them yourself (as the package managers generally won’t update them for you).
Some applications make it relatively simple to install the program by giving you an executable or a bash script you can run to install the program. It’s as simple as opening a terminal and running the script.
deb packages
Some packages come in the form of .deb files, these can be installed using the dpkg or apt package manager, with sudo dpkg -i ./filename.deb and sudo apt install ./filename.deb respectively. This will install the package using the package manager, however you may have to manually update the package.
Using make
Some packages may not be installable via a package manager at all, and instead you need to ‘build’ the application. In this scenareo the developer of the application will generally give you build instructions for you to use to compile the project yourself.
Generally following the install instructions given by the developer will work well, it’s normally stored in the README.md file in the repository. In most cases you will be using make to install the software. First check to see if there is a makefile file in the repository, as this will contain how Linux should build the software. For example, check out the makefile for Timeshift repository. First we can run make to build the software, then we will use make install to move the compiled binaries into the correct location for Linux to use (normally in the /bin and /usr/bin directories).
