Conclusion

In this chapter, you learned the basics of managing the software that’s installed in your Linux environment. First, we looked at how to accomplish this the easy way: software management via the package managers you’re most likely to encounter. Although this first approach should cover 90% of your needs, you then learned about the procedures you’ll need to apply to the last 10% of situations – careful vetting, followed by using custom install scripts or manual compilation and installation.

Hopefully you followed along with the practical compilation example and tried out the htop system monitor. Thankfully, htop is available via package managers everywhere – it’s a really useful tool that a lot of system administrators find invaluable on long-running production systems.

You should now be comfortable with the high-level concepts and practical commands you’ll need to effectively use many Unix and Linux systems, in both...