Operation Manual

The second partition is far larger and formatted as EXT4, a native Linux file system designed for high-speed access and data
safety. This partition contains the main chunk of the distribution. All the programs, the desktop, the users’ files and any software
that you install yourself are stored here. This takes up the bulk of the SD card.
Installing and Uninstalling Software
The default software installed with the Debian distribution is enough to get you started, but chances are you’re going to want to
customise your Pi according to your own requirements.
Installing new software onto the Pi is simple. The Debian distribution includes a tool called apt, which is a powerful package
manager. Packages are what Linux calls a piece of software, or a collection of different pieces of software designed to work
together.
Although apt is designed to be operated from the command line, it’s very user-friendly and easy to learn. There are GUIs for
apt, such as the popular Synaptic Package Manager, but they often struggle to run on the Pi due to the lack of memory. As a
result, we recommend that software be installed at the terminal.
Other Distributions
Debian, and distributions based on Debian, typically use apt as the package manager. It’s not the only tool out there, and other distributions make different
choices. Fedora Remix, for example, uses the pacman tool.
Pacman is no more difficult to use than apt, but its syntax (the way it expects you to phrase instructions to install new software or remove existing software)
is different. For instructions on how to use pacman instead of apt, type man pacman at the Fedora Remix terminal.
Other distributions may use the yum package manager. If you’re trying a distribution that uses yum, simply type man yum at the terminal for instructions.
A package manager’s job is to keep track of all the software installed on the system. It doesn’t just install new software—it also
keeps tabs on what is currently installed, allows old software to be removed and installs updates as they become available.
Package management is one of the areas where Linux differs greatly from operating systems like Windows or OS X. Although
it’s possible to manually download new software to install, it’s far more common to use the built-in package management tools
instead.
Before trying to install new software or upgrade existing software, you need to make sure the apt cache is up to date. To do this, simply type the
command sudo apt-get update.
Finding Software
The first step to installing a new piece of software is to find out what it’s called. The easiest way to do this is to search the cache
of available software packages. This cache is a list of all the software available to install via apt, stored on Internet servers
known as repositories.
The apt software includes a utility for managing this cache, called apt-cache. Using this software, it’s possible to run a search
on all the available software packages for a particular word or phrase.
For example, to find a game to play, you can type the following command:
apt-cache search game
That tells apt-cache to search its list of available software for anything which has the word “game” in its title or description. For
common search terms, you can end up with quite a list (see Figure 2-4), so try to be as specific as you can.
Figure 2-4: The last few results for an apt-cache “game” search