Hello everyone, a new Linode user here!

I was wondering about the Debian packages. I have a new clean Debian install and aptitude gives me a list of packages it would like to download. I'm assuming these are packages recommended by other packages as I have not selected anything to be installed myself.

Generally I'd err on the side of installing recommendations, but there are few things I'm wondering about. One of the recommendations is acpi and related packages but I don't see what good these would do on a virtualised environment. Also, Linode runs 3.0 kernel, but one of the packages is linux-image 2.6.x.

So the question is more like wondering how you more experienced Debian users have put up your systems? Any good overall advice, or should I just go and look through the packages and install the ones I need...

The packages listed in the Suggested and Recommended sections that apt-get shows are meant as 'install these for extra functionality'. These aren't required. Anything listed outside of the Suggested and Recommended sections are required dependencies for what you want to install, e.g. what you're installing depends on functionality from those packages in order to work.

What we recommend depends on what you want to do. For a web server, you would need either apache/httpd, lighttpd, or nginx to serve stuff (there are others but these are the most common). You would probably also need to install php.

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Kris the Piki Geeker

Thanks. Apache and related are kind of obvious if/when I need them. I was just wondering where this set of packages that is marked for install actually came from. The only thing I installed was shorewall that does not have those dependencies. So this actually might be more of me not knowing my way around aptitude. If I look at the details of a package in aptitude, the section "Packages which depend on xyz" gives a complete list of dependencies, right?

If it's a clean install and you didn't run aptitude upgrade or apt-get upgrade then they will be upgrades to existing software.

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I don't normally use aptitude, I normally use apt-cache or apt-get when I'm in Debian, but the way it's worded (Packages which depend on xyz), that looks more like it's saying, "This package is a dependency for those packages" (they use this package to get needed functionality) rather than saying "Those packages are dependencies for this package" (they provide functionality needed for this package).

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Kris the Piki Geeker

Aptitude's default settings has "Install recommended packages automatically" and "Remove unused packages automatically" enabled.
That can lead to quite a ton of unnecessary stuff installed, and sometimes may remove stuff your non-packaged stuff depends on.
I recommend disabling those.
I also disable auto-resolve of dependencies, as accepting the proposed solution is just one keypress away anyway, and it lets me review the proposal first.

In .deb:
Depends: Will not install or run without those. (Base libraries, runtimes)
Recommends: Will gain very significant functionality if those are installed. (Mail server for logcheck, OpenGL library for a math package that runs but won't draw 3D graphs without it)
Suggests: Will gain small additional functionality if this is installed. (Image converter library to add support of more formats to a program, for example.)

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rsk, providing useless advice on the Internet since 2005.

@obs I't is a clean install and right _after_ running apt-get update && apt-get upgrade I get this list of 47 packages to install, so definitely not upgrades. Thus me wondering this.

@Piki That's my thinking as well. E.g., 'acpi' has 2 packages that depend on it. xbattbar as recommended and munin-node as suggested, but neither of these is set to be installed. I was thinking that acpi would be installed, because something else depends on it, but that does not seem to be the case.

@rsk Thank, that seems to be more sensible settings...

Anyways, thanks for the feedback. This propably is not that big of an issue, it's just something is happening and I don't understand why and I don't like that at all... =)