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Hands-on Lab·Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator

Packages, on both families

The package manager is where Debian and Red Hat diverge most, and the exam may put you in front of either. This guide asks the same eight questions - is it installed, what owns this file, what will it drag in, what did remove leave behind - of both families at once, so the pair of commands is learned together instead of twice.

Operations Deployment Guide 11 of 38 Beginner

apt 3.2.0 with dpkg 1.23.7 on Ubuntu 26.04; dnf 4.20.0 with rpm 4.19.1.1 on RHEL 10. dnf 5 renames a few subcommands but everything on this page is unchanged. The low-level tool (dpkg, rpm) works on one file and knows nothing about repositories; the high-level one (apt, dnf) resolves dependencies and fetches.

Every command run on both hosts, Ubuntu first. The two transcripts are interleaved so you can see the same question asked of each family.
Server NameIP AddressOSRolesCPURAMHDD
LFCS-A01192.168.0.70Ubuntu 26.04 LTSPrimary host - most guides run only here2 Core4 GB50 GB
LFCS-C01192.168.0.72AlmaLinux 10.2The other distribution - dnf, firewalld and NetworkManager2 Core4 GB50 GB

This guide includes

Use this for the domain where the two families diverge most. This matters because "which package owns this file" is the most useful query in it - and each family answers with a different tool.

Before you start

  1. Four tools, two layers

  2. Is it installed, and what is it

  3. Which package owns this file

  4. Finding a package you do not have yet

  5. Installing, and what came with it

  6. Remove against purge, on a package that shows the difference

  7. Has anything on disk been changed

  8. What was done to this machine, and when

Official sources

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