Hello and welcome again. Today we will be talking about one of the most used ways to get software that is not in the default distribution repositories, the PPAs. As stated by the Launchpad.net page, "Personal Package Archives (PPA) allow you to upload Ubuntu source packages to be built and published as an apt repository by Launchpad. You can find out more about PPAs and how to use them in our help page.", In simple terms this means that someone can upload their app to Launchpad and then provide you with a small type of link called "PPA" that you can add to your list of application repositories for it to be able to allow your system to install that certain application and also update it directly. This method is only used by Ubuntu and distributions based of it (Which are many), meaning that you can have an installation of Linux Mint and use the same PPA system to install a certain application. Now that we have covered the definitions and uses of PPAs we can start with the practice. For our example we will be using the Numix Shine icon theme, this is one of the many icon themes that they have. You can visit their page [Click Here] and choose anything there or go directly to this icon theme [Click Here]. Remember, this is only an example, but this same method will work with any other application that uses PPAs. If you decided to pick the same icon theme you see something like this inside of a box (it is shown in the image above as well): sudo add-apt-repository ppa:numix/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install numix-icon-theme-shine Now lets discuss what this means. The first line "Sudo add-apt-repository" allow us to add "ppa:numix/ppa" to our repositories list. The second code, "sudo apt-get update" allows us to refresh or update our repositories list so our system will check for new repositories and also check their status. The third line "sudo apt-get install numix-icon-theme-shine", like we discussed in our previous post, is the command that we will use to download and install the application, in this case is the Numix Shine. Now in order to get this going we need to open the terminal and copy and paste the first code. If you don't remember how to open the terminal, it was CTRL + ALT + T or you can press the Windows key on your keyboard (between ALT and CRTL) and type "Terminal" and press enter. When we have our terminal open, we want to copy and paste the first line and press enter. After you do this, the command line will show you some information about the PPA itself and will tell you that if you want to continue you need to press the enter key and if you want to cancel adding the PPA you must press CTRL + C. Press enter and the process will be completed. The next step is to refresh our repository list. in order to do this we copy and paste the second, "sudo apt-get update" line in the terminal. The final step here is to install the application by copying and pasting the line "sudo apt-get install numix-icon-theme-shine" and it will start downloading the icon theme and that's it, we are done! Because this is an icon theme, we won't be able to see the application or apply it at all unless you have a special application to customize your desktop called "Unity Tweak", if you want, you can go ahead and install it with the command "sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool" or download it from here [Click Here]. If we were installing any other application we will be able launch it from the dash directly. Now that you know how to install applications with that require PPA to be installed, you can go out and get them all! if you liked the post, share it with a Linux novice in need, also if you think I should change something in this post, you can contact me directly and let me know or leave a comment in the post.
1 Comment
3/13/2015 10:23:28 am
To add a third-party repositories such as PPA , there is an easier way is to use the Y PPA Manager .
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
Angel MercedesElectrical Engineering student and lover of all things Open Source, 3D Printing, Electronics and Linux. Categories
All
Archives
May 2017
|