APT – How to Install Suggested/Recommended Packages

apt

I ran the following code and got this package needs these packages, now it also says these packages are suggested, and theses are recommended. How do I get those up to install as well.

myusuf3@purple:/etc$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.0 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  acroread ia32-libs lib32asound2 lib32bz2-1.0 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 lib32v4l-0 lib32z1 libaudio2
  libc6-i386 libcurl3 libflac8 libhal1 liblcms1 libmng1 libogg0 libpulse0 libqt4-dbus libqt4-network libqt4-opengl
  libqt4-xml libqtcore4 libqtgui4 libsdl-ttf2.0-0 libsdl1.2debian libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsndfile1 libv4l-0
  libvorbis0a libvorbisenc2 libx11-xcb1 nspluginwrapper
Suggested packages:
  libldap2 libgnome-speech7 lib32asound2-plugins nas liblcms-utils pulseaudio qt4-qtconfig
Recommended packages:
  pdf-viewer
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  acroread ia32-libs lib32asound2 lib32bz2-1.0 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 lib32v4l-0 lib32z1 libaudio2
  libc6-i386 libcurl3 libflac8 libhal1 liblcms1 libmng1 libogg0 libpulse0 libqt4-dbus libqt4-network libqt4-opengl
  libqt4-xml libqtcore4 libqtgui4 libsdl-ttf2.0-0 libsdl1.2debian libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsndfile1 libv4l-0
  libvorbis0a libvorbisenc2 libx11-xcb1 nspluginwrapper virtualbox-4.0
0 upgraded, 34 newly installed, 0 to remove and 26 not upgraded.
Need to get 168MB of archives.
After this operation, 460MB of additional disk space will be used.

Please and thank you

Best Answer

Recommends are installed by default (since Lucid). To negate this for a specific package, use apt-get --no-install-recommends install pkg. Suggests, however, are not. You can install the suggests for a single package installation by using apt-get -o APT::Install-Suggests="true" install pkg.

Installing conky without Suggests:

laney@iota> sudo apt-get install conky
[...]
Suggested packages:
  apcupsd moc mpd
The following NEW packages will be installed
  conky conky-all

…or with Suggests:

laney@iota> sudo apt-get -o APT::Install-Suggests="true" install conky
[...]
The following NEW packages will be installed
  apache2 apache2-doc apache2-mpm-worker apache2-suexec apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2.2-common apcupsd apcupsd-cgi apcupsd-doc ario ario-common conky
  conky-all icecast2 ices2 libao-common libao4 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap libcue1 libmpdclient2 libresid-builder0c2a libsidplay2 libsidutils0
  moc moc-ffmpeg-plugin mpd

You can make this the default behaviour by putting

APT::Install-Suggests "true"

in a file in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/, for example /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/30install-suggests.

Related Question