What is the difference between apt-get and dpkg?

Posted by William F. Hammond on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by William F. Hammond
Published on 2012-09-01T03:48:16Z Indexed on 2012/09/01 3:49 UTC
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12.04

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10.04

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lts

Both apt-get and dpkg can be used to install and remove packages. When to use which?

Context: I'm in stuck in package limbo between 10.04.4 LTS and 12.04.1 LTS after an attempted upgrade via the package manager. For example, to fix things I wanted to remove "skype" so that things it depends on could be freed up. But "aptitude" (my normal package management tool) refused to remove it.

The advice at http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/rescuing-an-interrupted-ubuntu-upgrade/ seems helpful but not adequate to resolve my package conflicts.

Also there's a strange thing where the grub menu seems not to be properly interpreted, but eventually I get the splash screen with "/ is not ready yet or not present. Continue to wait; or press S to skip or M to recover manually." Manual recovery puts me in a single user shell where I can easily remount / as rw and bring up the network. If I become myself, the command line seems quite robust, but, there seems to be no way to get X11 going.

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