apt-rpm, Maintain RPMs recommended by LSDS

1. Introduction

apt-rpm is Debian's Advanced Package Tool that has been ported to RedHat to handle the management of RPM based packages. apt-rpm is a command line utility that can be used to quickly update or install packages from a centrally maintained repository. Linux Systems Design & Support maintains such a repository for recent versions of RedHat.

This documentation is not intended to replace the apt-rpm documentation, but to simply supplement it. You should still read the man pages for apt-get and apt.conf for more complete information.

1.1 RedHat Versions supported

WSS maintains apt-rpm repositories for the following operating systems:

  RedHat Linux 7.3  (End Of Life: 31 Dec 2003)
  RedHat Linux 8.0  (End Of Life: 31 Dec 2003)
  RedHat Linux 9  (End Of Life: 30 Apr 2004)
  Fedora Core 1  (End Of Life: 30 Apr 2004)
  Fedora Core 2  (End Of Life: 31 Dec 2004)

WSS will continue to maintain these repositories as long as the site sources continue to produce the RPMs or one year past the official RedHat End Of Life (see the End Of Life listed above) of the operating system, which ever comes first. As new versions of Fedora Core become available, WSS will create and maintain apt-rpm repositories for them.

A note to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) users: You must receive your officially licensed RHEL RPM updates directly from RedHat using the up2date utility.

1.2 Download and install apt-rpm

You should download a WorkStation Support (WSS) maintained rpm for apt-rpm. It includes all the necessary configurations to use the WSS apt-rpm repository.

Download the RPMs for your specific distribution from here:

ftp://ftp.wss.yale.edu/pub/linux/yale/rpms/apt

The apt-devel package is not necessary for running apt-rpm, but it doesn't hurt to install it.

After downloading the appropriate RPM or RPMs for your distribution, install them with a command like this:

rpm -Uvh apt-*.rpm

At installation time, apt-rpm syncs with the repository, so it may take a minute or two to install if your machine is old or slow.

1.3 Using apt-rpm

The first thing you should do after installing apt-rpm is to make sure you synchronize your local database with the RPM repository. This makes sure you will get all of the latest RPM updates. To do this just type:

  apt-get update

If you look in /etc/cron.daily you will find a script called apt-get-update.cron. This script will run daily and do the synchronization for you every day.

It may be useful to see what RPMs are available first. To do this just type:

  apt-get -s upgrade

To actually download and install the latest RPM updates:

  apt-get upgrade

If you would like to automatically update your system, through cron for example, use this command in your cron script:

  apt-get --assume-yes upgrade

1.4 Getting more help

apt-rpm is a very powerful and flexible program, for more information on how to use and configure apt-rpm, I recommend running these commands to view the man pages:

man apt-get
man apt.conf

1.5 Upgrading the kernel using apt-rpm

apt-rpm does not upgrade the kernel by default. If there is a kernel upgrade available, apt-get will tell you that some kernel packages are being "held". You must install the updated kernel packages with the "apt-get install" command. For example, if apt-get tells you that it is holding "kernel kernel-smp kernel-source", then run:

apt-get install kernel kernel-smp kernel-source

1.6 A note for 7.3, 8.0, and 9 users:

Because these distributions are so old, dependencies have changed to the point where "apt-get upgrade" will not install several available updates, because of package inter-dependency problems. It WILL notify you that these packages are not being upgraded, however.

If this is happening to you, just run "apt-get dist-upgrade", which will resolve the dependencies and upgrade properly. Often times, certain packages are no longer necessary, and it will tell you that it is replacing one package with another. Because I have configured apt-rpm to never, under any circumstances, remove a package, you will have to manually remove the package being replaced (rpm -e packagename).

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