A couple months ago, we published an article about Cylon, a maintenance program for Arch Linux and derivatives. Today, we are going to see yet another maintenance program for Debian-based systems from the same developer who created Cylon. Say hello to Cylon-deb, a CLI menu-based Debian Linux maintenance program written in Bash. As you might have guessed, Cylon-deb is the fork and truncated version of Cylon. It is free and open source program hosted in GitHub. So, you're free to fork it, add features, improve code and/or fix bugs if there are any.
Clylon-deb script will perform many maintenance tasks, including the following:
- Install and remove packages;
- Remove all orphaned packages (i.e not required as dependencies);
- Upgrade packages;
- Search for packages in the database;
- Search for already installed packages;
- Check for updates;
- Display the details of a package in the database;
- Display the details of the installed package(s);
- List all files owned by a given package;
- Clean up the local cache;
- Write installed package lists to files;
- Displays detailed information on system and package setup;
- And few other tasks.
Install Cylon-deb
The developer has created a PPA to ease the installation. To install on Debian and debian variants such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, run the following commands one by one:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:typematrix/cylondeb sudo apt update sudo apt install cylondeb
How to use Cylon-deb
Once installed, launch Cylon-deb using command:
Cylon.sh
Note: 'c' is capital letter in the above command.
Sample output would be:
As you can see, Cylon-deb main menu is self-explanatory. The main menu contains the following five sub-menus.
- Updates
- xterm terminal
- System information
- Cylon information
- Exit
System updates
Type number 1 from the main menu to open Updates sub-menu.
=============================================================================================== Updates =============================================================================================== Update options:- 1) Check for updates (no download), aptitude search '~U' 2) Upgrade all, apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade 3) Display info about a package, apt-cache show 4) Install Package, apt install 5) Search for packages in the database, apt search 6) Delete Package, apt remove 7) Search for already installed packages, aptitude search '~i' 8) Display info for locally installed packages, dpkg -s 9) List all files owned by a given package, dpkg -L 10) Clean up all local cache, apt-get autoclean 11) Write installed package lists to files 12) Remove all packages not required as dependencies), apt-get autoremove 13) Return to main menu By your command:
As you can see, it displays all system maintenance tasks. Just type a number to run the respective actions. For example, type 3 to display information about a package. It will prompt you to enter the name of the package.
Press any key to go back. To return back to main menu, type 13.
To view your system information, type 3 from the main menu.
You can also view the system information, without opening the Cylon-deb interface.
Cylon.sh -s
Or,
Cylon.sh --system
If a particular action requires a specific package, it will inform you. You need to install it in-order to perform that particular action.
For example, I type 2 to display the xterm terminal and I got this message.
As you see in the above screenshot, it displays "xterm: command not found", because I didn't install it in my ubuntu system. Press any key to go back and type 1 to open 'Updates' sub-menu and type 4 to install xterm package.
Now go back to main menu and type 2 to open xterm terminal. It will work now.
To view the details of Cylon-deb, type 4 from the main menu.
It will also display the required dependencies needed by Cylon-deb to work properly in the next screen. Just install the missing dependencies using "apt-get" command.
Dependencies aptitude is Installed deborphan is Not installed Press any key to continue
In my case, deborphan is not installed yet.
To exit Cylon-deb, type number 5.
Cylon-deb is simple, yet fully functional script that helps you to maintain your debian based systems with a menu-based interface. Give it a try and let us know what you think about this script in the comment section below.
Resource:
1 comment
Just a heads-up:
The PPA is only good for Xenial