4
A D D I N G A N D R E M O V I N G
S O F T W A R E
One of the
most fundamental tasks in
Linux—or any operating system—is add-
ing and removing software. You’ll often
need to install software that didn’t come with
your distribution or remove
unwanted software so it
doesn’t take up hard drive space.
Some software requires other software to run, and you’ll sometimes
find that you can download everything you need at once in a
software package,
which is a group of files—typically libraries and other dependencies—that
you need for a piece of software to run successfully.
When you install a
package, all the files within it are installed together, along with a script
to make loading the software simpler.
In
this chapter, we examine three key methods for adding new soft-
ware: apt package manager, GUI-based
installation managers, and git.
