Debian
Debian is distributed freely over Internet. This page has options for installing Debian Stable. If you are interested in Testing or Unstable, visit our releases page. Many of the vendors sell the distribution for less than US$5 plus shipping (check their web page to see if they ship internationally). You can try Debian by booting a live system from a CD, DVD or USB key without installing any files to the computer. When you are ready, you can run the included installer (starting from Debian 10 Buster, this is the end-user-friendly Calamares Installer). Provided the images meet your size, language, and package selection requirements, this method may be suitable for you. Read more information about this method to help you decide.
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DPKG
DPKG is a tool to install, build, remove and manage Debian packages. The primary and more user-friendly front-end for DPKG is aptitude. DPKG itself is controlled entirely via command line parameters, which consist of exactly one action and zero or more options. The action parameter tells DPKG what to do and options control the behavior of the action in some way. DPKG can also be used as a front-end to DPKG-deb(1) and DPKG-query. The list of supported actions can be found later on in the actions section. If any such action is encountered DPKG just runs DPKG-deb or DPKG-query with the parameters given to it, but no specific options are currently passed to them, to use any such option the back-ends need to be called directly. DPKG maintains some usable information about available packages. The information is divided into three classes, states, selection states, and flags. These values are intended to be changed mainly with dselect.
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Synaptic
Synaptic is a graphical package management program for apt. It provides the same features as the apt-get command-line utility with a GUI front-end based on Gtk+. Install, remove, upgrade and downgrade single and multiple packages. Upgrade your whole system. Manage package repositories (sources.list). Find packages by name, description, and several other attributes. Select packages by status, section, name, or a custom filter. Sort packages by name, status, size, or version. Browse all available online documentation related to a package. Download the latest changelog of a package. Lock packages to the current version. Force the installation of a specific package version. Undo/Redo selections. Built-in terminal emulator for the package manager. Debian/Ubuntu only, configure packages through the debconf system. Debian/Ubuntu only, Xapain-based fast search (thanks to Enrico Zini).
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fpm
fpm is a tool that lets you easily create packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Arch Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and more! fpm isn’t a new packaging system, it’s a tool to help you make packages for existing systems with less effort. It does this by offering a command-line interface to allow you to create packages easily. FPM is written in ruby and can be installed using gem. For some package formats (like rpm and snap), you will need certain packages installed to build them. Some package formats require other tools to be installed on your machine to be built; especially if you are building a package for another operating system/distribution. FPM takes your program and builds packages that can be installed easily on various operating systems. It can take any nodejs package, ruby gem, or even a python package and turn it into a deb, rpm, pacman, etc. package.
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