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- <h1>Puppy Package Manager (PPM)</h1>
- A "package" is Linux terminology for an application. These are held in
- online repositories, and you can download and install any package.<br>
- <h2>How to install a package<br>
- </h2>
- You click a radio-button along the top to choose the desired repository
- -- usually the left-most one is the one most suitable for your current
- version of Puppy.<br>
- <br>
- The radio-buttons aligned vertically on the left enable you to narrow
- the display to a specific category (these notes are for the 'Classic'
- user interface, 'Ziggy' UI has slightly different layout).<br>
- <br>
- Notice the checkboxes labeled EXE, DEV, DOC and NLS. Many Puppy PET packages are split into smaller packages, as follows:<br>
- <br>
- EXE: This is the actual application, you definitely want this.<br>
- DEV: This contains development files, only of interest to those into compiling source code.<br>
- DOC: This contains the documentation files of the package<br>
- NLS: This contains the international language files of the package.<br>
- <br>
- Note that all packages (if you only install the main "EXE" package)
- support English. The NLS package will add support for other languages,
- but this varies considerably from package to package. Some packages do
- not have any non-English support.<br>
- <br>
- Note that PET packages follow a naming convention, like this:<br>
- <br>
- <div style="margin-left: 40px;">
- abiword-1.2.3.pet ("EXE" package)<br>
- abiword_DEV-1.2.3.pet<br>
- abiword_DOC-1.2.3.pet<br>
- abiword_NLS-1.2.3.pet<br>
- </div>
- <br>
- Also note that not all authors of PET packages follow the practice of
- splitting PET packages into these component parts. In some cases there
- may be, for example, 'abiword-1.2.3.pet' which has everything in it. The
- reason that the splitting is usually done is to reduce the size of the
- main EXE package.<br>
- <br>
- As from late May 2012, the PPM is enhanced to support EXE,DEV,DOC,NLS
- filtering of Debian and Ubuntu DEB packages and Mageia RPM packages. For example,
- 'abiword-doc_1.2.3-3build1_all.deb' is recognised as a documentation
- package.<br>
- <br>
- When you click on one of the packages displayed in the big window,
- another window pops up asking if you really want to install the
- package, and also offers further information about the package -- so
- you can learn more about it before deciding whether to install it.<br>
- <h2>How to uninstall a package<br>
- </h2>
- When a package is installed, it appears in the window bottom-right.<br>
- To uninstall a package, simply click on it. There will be another window asking you to confirm deletion.<br>
- <h2>Package repositories</h2>
- There are various PET repositories. PETs are the Puppy format for packages, an acronym that we humourously say stands for <span style="font-style: italic;">Puppy Extra Treats</span>. Those on offer will depend on which
- Puppy you are using, but usually there will be these available at least:<br>
- <br>
- <div style="margin-left: 40px;">
- puppy-2: The very old Puppy 2.x series<br>
- puppy-3: Puppy 3.x series<br>
- puppy-4: Puppy 4.x series<br>
- puppy-5: Puppy 5.x series<br>
- puppy-noarch: These have no compiled executables and work in any Puppy (and any CPU)<br>
- puppy-common: These have compiled executables and are intended to work in any Puppy<br>
- </div>
- <br>
- A note about those last two: "noarch" packages do not have any compiled
- executables, so they will work regardless of CPU -- x86, ARM, whatever.
- "common" have compiled executables, and are a collection of packages
- used in most builds of Puppy.<br>
- <br>
- For your Puppy, you may also have others, such as 'puppy-quirky',
- 'puppy-wary5', or 'puppy-lucid'. One of these will be a collection of
- packages created specifically for your particular Puppy. For example,
- Precise Puppy is built from Ubuntu Precise Pangolin binary packages, and
- PET repo 'puppy-precise' has PET packages created explicitly for this
- pup.<br>
- <br>
- Generally, use those that seem most appropriate to your version of
- Puppy. The older ones have packages that may or may not work in your
- Puppy -- the older the repository, the more likely this may be the
- case. <br>
- <br>
- We mostly keep the old repositories available, as sometimes there is
- some old package that you really want to use. But as a general
- principle, look in the more recent repositories first.<br>
- <br>
- Your Puppy may be built from the packages of one of the other major
- Linux distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu or Slackware. In that case,
- PPM will offer those repositories. They are going to be the most
- compatible and the ones that you should look in first. For example,
- Precise Puppy, built from Ubuntu Precise Pangolin, will have the
- 'ubuntu-precise-main', 'ubuntu-precise-universe' and
- 'ubuntu-precise-multiverse' repositories.<br>
- <br>
- Of course, the packages of other distributions are not going to be PET
- packages. PETs have ".pet" on the end of the filename (file extension).<br>
- Debian and Ubuntu have DEB packages, with ".deb" on the end of the filename.<br>
- Slackware packages have ".tgz" or ".txz" file extension.<br>
- Mageia has RPM packages, with ".rpm" file extension.<br>
- Whatever the type of package, PPM is capable of installing it.<br>
- <h2>
- Searching</h2>
- The "Find:" box enables you to search for any package.<br>
- <br>
- You can type in a partial name, but a match is only found from the
- left. For example, if you do a search for "pan" you might find this:<br>
- <br>
- <div style="margin-left: 40px;">pango-1.28.1-w5 Library for layout and rendering of internationalized text<br>
- pango_DOC-1.28.1-w5 Library for layout and rendering of internationalized text<br>
- pangomm-2.26.2-w5 oo wrapper for pango library<br>
- pangomm_DOC-2.26.2-w5 oo wrapper for pango library<br>
- panoramixproto-1.1-w5 Panoramix extension headers<br>
- </div>
- <br>
- But doing a search on "mm" yields nothing, as there are no package names starting with "mm".<br>
- <br>
- However, the Find box will accept '*' wildcards, what is referred to as
- "glob wildcards". So, type in "*mm" will find all packages with "mm" in
- their names.<br>
- <br>
- You can even have multiple wildcards, for example "p*mix*to", which will find the 'panoramixproto' package.<br>
- <br>
- The search is case-insensitive, so a search for "PAN" will give the same results as shown above.<br>
- <br>
- As from May 2012, PPM also supports searching for multiple keywords. Also,
- the Description field is searched as well as the package name. For
- example, it you type into the search-box, "abiword plugins", it
- will find packages with these two words, either in the package name or
- the description.<br>
- <br>
- Also from May 2012, you can choose to search just the current repository
- or all repositories. Previously, it was restricted to current repo
- only.<br>
- <br>
- One thing to note about the search is that it searches the entire
- repository (or repositories), and ignores the vertical Category radiobuttons on the left
- side.<br>
- <h2>Installing without the PPM GUI</h2>
- You can actually download any package, from anywhere, and install it.
- All that you have to do is click on the package in the file-manager
- window, and the package-installer component of PPM will run and install
- the package. This works for many types of packages, including PETs,
- Ubuntu/Debian DEBs, Slackware, and Arch packages.<br>
- <br>
- Note however, if you install an individual package in this way, without
- going through the PPM GUI interface, any dependencies are not
- installed, and you will have to take care of that yourself.<br>
- <br>
- One good thing, a package installed in this way will show up in the PPM
- GUI installed-packages-window and it can thus be uninstalled.<br>
- <h2>How to update Puppy to next version</h2>
- A little while ago, someone criticised PPM, stating that it did not
- allow a complete upgrade of Puppy to the next version. The package
- managers in some distributions allow you to install all packages
- required to completely upgrade to the latest version of the distro.<br>
- <br>
- PPM does not offer that, because Puppy does not work that way. It is
- outside the ambit, or we could say the "contract" of what PPM is
- required to do. A new version of Puppy is provided as just three or four
- files. Say for example you have a "frugal" installation of Puppy on
- hard drive, it will consist of just three files, vmlinuz, initrd.gz and
- the main Puppy filesystem (for example precise-5.3.sfs). There is also a
- fourth file known as the "devx" (for example devx_precise_5.3.sfs). To
- upgrade, all you do is replace those files. It is a totally different
- system to a package-by-package upgrade. This page has more details: <a href="http://puppylinux.com/hard-puppy.htm">http://puppylinux.com/hard-puppy.htm</a> <br>
- <br>
- Regards,<br>
- Barry Kauler, May 2012<br>
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