If we talk about the Windows operating system, every program has a simple setup.exe file or program.zip file. In Mac, we have program.dmg or program.sit files. Using both of these operating system, they usually ask some very basic configuration question about the license agreement or about the drive or folder you want to choose for installing the software. Using Linux, it is considered but not a true thing that installing application/software is a tough task.

APT for Debian based distributions:

APT is the tool which used for installation of packages from the software repository. Shortly it is the simple tool which is command based used for installing the software. apt-get  is the command and it is the easiest style for installing the files and other software packages. This tool informs you about the current package which is available in repositories. To install the package write

apt-get install ${package_name}

if you want to uninstall the package replace remove with install

apt-get remove ${package_name}

Software packages are placed somewhere in the online repositories. The task of APT is to handle the local database which is placed on the system’s hard drive and it also contains information about the packages which are available and their location. So , when someone type the command apt-get install conky, APT will start searching the database about the package conky and installation will be started once the user press ‘y’ meaning ‘Yes’.

To keep updated about the newly available packages on the repositories, one must need to update APT regularly.

The command for the APT update is simple.

Apt-get update

To update the database and also upgrading the security and for the patches that are available for some software. The user needs to type this command only once.

Apt-get update; Apt-get upgrade

And you must remember about the package managing tools, they need the user to be in root or superuser.

In installing the software in the Debian base distributions, you are required to use “sudo” before apt-get then it will prompt you to enter the password.

sudo apt-get install conky
sudo apt-get remove conky
sudo apt-get update

you need to type the password to install any package.

yum: Linux distribution like Red Hat and Fedora based on RPM:

You will not feel any kind of trouble while understating about yum because it is very much similar to apt-get. As apt-get is used for the software installation of the Debian, same like that ‘yum’ is used to install the software for the RPM package. It works the same by downloading and installing packages from the repository.

The difference between yum and APT is that by default yum does not keep the local database on the system’s hard drive. So it does not require any update but it does require an installation of security patches and bug fixes.

So, these are the processes used for installation of Software in Linux.