Optional Programs

There are programs which will be used and may not be present by default in your installation. Some of these have already been mentioned before. Below is a list of these programs that are more or less necessary for full functionality:

Program	Description
command-not-found	If you enter a command on the command line or call a program and it does not exist, the message "Command not found" appears. The command-not-found package makes sure that in addition to the message, suggestions are made as to what could be meant and where a program or command with this or a similar name can be found. (apt-get install command-not-found, then apt update to populate the command-not-found database.)
lolcat	It is a ruby gem and works like cat but colorized. (apt-get/yum/pacman install lolcat). You also can wget it from the GitHub repo, but you need to have ruby installed. Then you can install lolcat with gem install lolcat assuming you have unzipped the archive and changed to the directory where the files have been extracted to.
most	there is an alias set and if most is installed it will be used as pager, and instead of less. (apt-get/yum/pacman install most)
netstat	part of net-tools package (apt-get/yum/pacman install net-tools for ARCH users: it can be found in the AUR (https://sourceforge.net/projects/net-tools/)

One or the other package may not be available in distros other than Debian- or Ubuntu-based.

Of course you need root privileges to install packages. Usually this is obtained by using 'sudo' in front of the program or command to be executed (in our case 'apt-get') or with the command 'sudo -i'. The 'sudo -i' command logs you in as root and you remain in that status in that terminal window until the 'exit' command is entered or the window is closed.

You can use apt install <package name> instead of apt-get install <package name>. Depending on your distro, one or the other will offer more options. For the installation, however, it is unimportant.

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Instead of using command line tools you can use a package manager like (if you insist to work in a shell) Aptitude apt-get/yum/dnf install aptitude, or Synaptic in a graphical evironment. It's more convenient to use a package manager. If you use Synaptic, I recommend installing xapian-tools and apt-xapian-index as well. This gives Synaptic a search bar in the main window that is always visible and prevents from opening a dialog box each time you want to do a search. apt-get/yum/pacman install synaptic xapian-tools apt-xapian-index Some distributions may already have this built into Synaptic, e.g. Kubuntu.