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Nate
Asked: 2010-05-05 11:48:11 +0800 CST

In Ubuntu Linux, how do I list packages installed from the “universe” repository?

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On an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server, I want to list installed packages and see what repository they come from.

It’s easy to list installed packages, but it does not include the name of the repository (such as “main” or “universe”). And this information isn’t in /var/lib/dpkg/status, so dpkg-query doesn’t show it either.

I want to get a list of “unsupported” software—that is, software that doesn’t come from the “main” repository, and for which Ubuntu does not guarantee security updates.

Note: This is a server. It does not have X, GNOME or KDE installed.

ubuntu debian apt dpkg

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Okay, I figured out how to do this:

    aptitude search "~i" -F "%s# %p"

    Which of course can easily be grepped to find items from the “universe” repository:

    aptitude search "~i" -F "%s# %p" | grep universe
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  2. You can provide a custom format for the output of the dpkg command (using the -f option). Try something like this, using the Origin variable:

    dpkg-query -f='${Package} ${Version}\t${Origin}\n' --get-selections

    There's more info on the formatting argument on this page: http://www.tin.org/bin/man.cgi?section=1&topic=dpkg-query

    The default format string is "${Package}\t${Version}\n". Actu- ally, all other fields found in the status file (i.e. user defined fields) can be requested, too. They will be printed as- is, though, no conversion nor error checking is done on them. To get the name of the dpkg maintainer and the installed ver- sion, you could run:

    dpkg-query -W -f='${Package} ${Version}\t${Maintainer}\n' dpkg

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  3. I tried aptitude search ~i -F "%s# %p"

    in ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 but it didn't show repositories.

    So I wrote this small script:

    # more origins.sh
#!/bin/bash
for i in $(dpkg -l |grep ^ii |awk -F' ' '{print $2}'); do
  apt-cache showpkg "$i"|head -3|grep -v '^Versions'|cut -d'(' -f2|cut -d')' -f1|sed -e 's/^Package: //;' | paste -d '\t' - -
done

    Then 

    bash origins.sh|grep universe
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  4. This is not exactly an answer but might be used to help. A colleague showed me this the other day. You can find out where a package is from using this command:

    apt-cache policy <package-name>

    For example:

     apt-cache policy xterm  
 xterm:  
 Installed: 271-1ubuntu2.1    
 Candidate: 271-1ubuntu2.1  
 Version table:    *** 271-1ubuntu2.1 0  
         500 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main amd64 Packages  
         100 /var/lib/dpkg/status  
      271-1ubuntu2 0  
         500 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/ubuntu/ precise/main amd64 Packages
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