Searching the apt-get repositories

If you need to install a package via apt-get but you don’t know it’s exact name there is a simple way of searching the repository to find it.

If, for instance you wanted to install Kopete you would search the repository like so:

apt-cache search kopete

This will return a list of programs that looks like this:

kdeartwork-emoticons - emoticon collections for KDE chat clients
kdenetwork-dev - development files for the KDE network module
kopete - instant messenger for KDE
ichthux-emoticons - Christian emoticons for Kopete
kmess - Instant messenger to use MSN on KDE
kopete-otr - Off-The-Record encryption for Kopete
kopete-plugin-desklist - Kopete plugin which displays online contacts on desktop
kopete-kde4 - instant messenger for KDE 4
kdenetwork-dev-kde4 - development files for the KDE 4 network module
kdeartwork-emoticons-kde4 - emoticon collections for KDE4 chat clients

You can see from this that the package you need is “kopete” or “kopete-kde4″ if you’re running KDE 4.

You can then go on to install the package with:

sudo apt-install kopete