Ubuntu is a Linux distribution that is popular in the world. It has a lot of applications and tools that you can use to do your day-to-day tasks. One of the most popular Ubuntu applications is search for packages. This article will show you how to search for packages on Ubuntu.


Syntax:

Example:

Rather useful, no? I’ve found it very useful even when I know the name of the package I’m trying to install, you can figure out what the names of extra plugins are, as in the above example. I had initially installed monodevelop, but didn’t realize there was nunit and version control plugins for it.

monodevelop – C#/Boo/Java/Nemerle/ILasm Development Environmentmonodevelop-boo – Boo plugin for MonoDevelopmonodevelop-java – Java plugin for MonoDevelopmonodevelop-nunit – NUnit plugin for MonoDevelopmonodevelop-query – MonoQuery plugin for MonoDevelopmonodevelop-versioncontrol – VersionControl plugin for MonoDevelop

You may also want to run the results through a more, or even a grep. For instance:

libflash-mozplugin – GPL Flash (SWF) Library – Mozilla-compatible pluginmozilla-helix-player – the helix audio and video player (browser plugin)j2re1.4-mozilla-plugin – Java plugin for mozilla/firefoxmozilla-acroread – Adobe Acrobat(R) Reader plugin for mozilla / konquerortotem-gstreamer-firefox-plugin – Totem Firefox Plugin – gstreamer versiontotem-xine-firefox-plugin – Totem Firefox Plugin – xine version