Re: linux software installation

vito writes:

in windows xp, you can check it through control panel.

in linux command prompt, where to get similar info? i need to know if:

* Python(>=2.3)
* SQLite and PySQLite
* R (>= 2.0), GeneTS and RPy
* BioPython(>=1.24)
* NCBI BLAST Standlone Edition
* Cheetah
* Graphviz and pydot

are installed.

thanks a lot!!

It depends on which specific Linux distribution you are using. Different Linux distributions use different software package management tools. Fedora, SUSE, and their derivatives, use RPM. Debian, and its derivatives use APT.

With RPM, you do need to know, beforehand, the name of the software package. Usually the package name is what you would intuitively expect. For Python, it's "python", so:

$ rpm -q python
python-2.4.1-2

So, I know I have Python 2.4.1 installed. If you do not know the name of the package, there's some guesswork involved. "rpm -q -a | sort" gives you a sorted list of all installed packages, which you can use as a starting point. "rpm -q -i <NAME>" gives more information about a specific package, including a brief description.

This only works for software that was installed using "rpm". If you hack your way through downloading, compiling and installing some warez manually, rpm won't know anything about it. For newly-downloaded software to be properly registered by rpm, you need to know how to build RPM packages, which is an art in of itself.

On Fedora's Gnome desktop, there's also a small utility, accessible as Desktop|System Settings|Add/Remove applications; but it gives only a fairly high level overview of major package components that are currently installed, and does not really give you detailed version information.

Linux distributions that use APT have equivalent ways of obtaining package configuration.

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