Home Package management Cylon-deb : The Debian Linux Maintenance Program

Cylon-deb : The Debian Linux Maintenance Program

By sk
Published: Last Updated on 510 views

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.

  1. Updates
  2. xterm terminal
  3. System information
  4. Cylon information
  5. 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:

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1 comment

Kenneth Jean December 24, 2017 - 12:02 am

Just a heads-up:
The PPA is only good for Xenial

Reply

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