Background:

It’s easy to agree that things take longer with a mouse. Sure, it’s easier/more intuitive, but that comes at the sacrifice of speed. Which is why powerful text editors like Vi and Emacs are so lightweight. And CLI systems are so fast. Etcetera.

It’s also easy to agree that the more icons GNOME/KDE/etc. has to load when it’s booted up, the longer it’s going to take.

The meat:

To quickly and efficiently launch a program–without the need for icons or even a mouse–press Alt-F2. A dialog box will come up. Just type the program name into it, and press enter.

First of all, I’m sorry I haven’t posted for a while–school went ‘banoonoos’ (as Joss Whedon would say), and any remaining time went to FSM.

Second of all, I’m contemplating starting a new ‘syle’ of post–handy tips. They’re meant to be concise bits of usefulness. Yes, yes, yes, this one isn’t very concise, but I consider it an extenuating circumstance They should have two parts–the [Background:], for…um…background information, and then another part which is the real tip.

That was way too long-winded. Sorry.

At any rate, here’s the real post:

[Background:]

A lot of people use the command line to install packages. Add/Remove is incomplete, Synaptic is slow, and the command-line is awesome.

I find myself using Apitude a lot more than apt-get, for the plain and simple reason that it’s a lot easier to make up commands. sudo aptitude install thunderbird works, sudo apt-get thunderbird doesn’t.

I always kind of got frustrated by the fact that after thinking for a while, I would need to type in ‘Y’ to confirm that I wanted to use disk space. (I suppose I can see the rationale for that feature, but it is annoying)

[Meat:]

To make Aptitude not ask you if you’re OK with the disk space it’s going to use, and the dependencies that have to be installed, use the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install yourprogramname

Where yourprogramname is the name of the program you want to install.