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Re: [LUG] Software hunt: Something to solve equations

 

Terry Hill wrote:
>>>  8*a^2+15*a*b-3*a*c
>> My email client is transforming the angle bracket 2 into a superscript,
>> which happens to be right here but I think I'll switch it off.

Which turned out to be disabling emoticons (huh?) in Icedove.

> I'll give yacas a go in a mo - I generally use apt-get for that sort
> of thing, any difference using your command?

The primary difference is that aptitude remembers which packages were
installed as dependencies of things you asked for, and removes them when
you uninstall the thing that you actually wanted.

So:

aptitude install b
aptitude purge b

Should get you back where you started, where as with apt-get if b was a
package with dependencies apt-get will have left some the dependent
package for deborphan or similar to find.

I believe since Debian Lenny "aptitude" has been recommended. But plenty
of Debian folk have "apt-get" etched into their muscle memory and
haven't made the switch, and most of the time it isn't a huge benefit.
Still I like to stick with recommended procedures, and I'm the kind of
person to install all sorts of things to try them, or to recreate a bug,
so being able to straighten things out more easily is likely to make my
Debian installs last even longer.

http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-pkgtools.en.html
http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-uptodate.en.html

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