Getting Apt To Work On RedHat

Apt is Debian's Package Management System, and installing it on RedHat has some profound advantages, in that it will find all the RPMs and handle dependencies and basically just make package installation and upgrades a breeze.

Note that the method presented here still uses RPM files on the back end (and I wouldn't suggest trying anything else on RedHat).

Basic Installation

• Go to http://apt.freshrpms.net/ and get the appropriate version for your system. Easiest way to get it: "cd /tmp", "wget <url of rpm>".
• If you're not sure of your version, use rpm -v and compare to what's on that site.
• NOTE ON RH AS 2.1 Oddly enough, despite what you might expect, RedHat Advanced Server 2.1 seems to be closer to RH 7.2 then 7.3. If you go with 7.3 in your apt sources list, it will want to upgrade a lot of stuff.
• Run "rpm -i <the apt rpm file you downloaded>".

Signature Checking Of RPMs Whilst Using Apt

This section describes how to get apt to check that an rpm has an official RedHat signature. It can be skipped if you don't care about that sort of thing, but I wouldn't reccommend it.

• Get official RedHat GPG public key from the redhat public key page. The fingerprint of the security@redhat.com key is CA 20 86 86 2B D6 9D FC 65 F6 EC C4 21 91 80 CD DB 42 A6 0E. But don't take my word for it; run Google and check. Copy the key to a file.
• Run "gpg --import <the redhat key file>". If you get an invalid armor error, make sure there's a blank line between the comment and the text block. In later versions of rpm (4.2.1 at least), you should instead run "rpm --import <keyfile>"
• Put aptrpm-1 into /usr/local/bin. Make sure to 'chmod 755' it. This is originally from the apt4rpm sourceforge cvs page, with the amazingly important change that rpm is now called by absolute path when doing the signature checking (duh!). It's also modified to print out the actual signature check output from the "rpm -K" call.
• Put apt.conf into /etc/apt. This tells apt to use aptrpm-1 instead of the normal apt program, and has configuration to tell aptrpm-1 to do the signature checking, since the basic apt program has no idea what rpm signatures are.

• From now on, everytime you install a package, you should see a line like:

  	/var/cache/apt/archives/vim-minimal_1%3a6.1-18.7x.2_i386.rpm: md5 gpg OK
  	

  If you don't, stop using apt until you know why. Come pester me or something.

Basic Apt Usage

• When it's installed, run "apt-get update". Then run "apt-get update" again.
• To find a package, "apt-cache search ", where can be a regex.
• To install a package, "apt-get install ", for example "apt-get install gcc". This will find all the dependencies and present with a list of what it needs to install and/or remove to get the latest version of what you've asked for.
• To upgrade all the packages on the system, "apt-get upgrade". This can also take a single package.
• Occasionally run "apt-get update" to get the latest package information.