Enabling apt-get on a default Amazon EC2 instance which has yum installed

Question

I'd like to call something like:

sudo yum install apt

to enable me to use apt-get as well as yum for installation.

However this doesn't work. I get the following back:

Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, priorities, security, update-motd
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * amzn-main: packages.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com
 * amzn-updates: packages.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com
Setting up Install Process
No package apt available.
Error: Nothing to do

It looks like it requires making the default Amazon EC2 instance aware of repositories.

In a nutshell: how I can simply enable use of apt-get instead of just yum?

Answer 1

apt-get is a Debian tool. yum (and rpm) are Red Hat tools. They are not compatible; neither are the packages which they install.

If you want to use apt-get, use a Debian (or Ubuntu) image instead of Red Hat (or CentOS, or whatnot).

Answer 2

It sounds like @duskwuff is probably correct: you're expecting a Debian (or Debian-based, like Ubuntu) operating system. Yum is used in Red Hat-based operating systems (like Fedora, CentOS, Yellow Dog, Scientific, whatever).

They serve about the same purposes: for the most common cases:

   apt-cache search $FOO         ==   yum search $FOO   ||  yum search all $FOO
   apt-get install $FOO          ==   yum install $FOO
   apt-get update                ==   (not needed, happens on every hit)
   apt-get upgrade               ==   yum update

However, apt is available on stock Fedora. If you are running Fedora —

     $ cat /etc/fedora-release 
    Fedora release 15 (Lovelock)

Then you can add in the stock Fedora repositories by copying them from the /etc/yum.repos.d on another machine running the same OS. (Check for the files already being there, but disabled: /etc/yum.repos.d/ should have a number of .repo files, that might be disabled, for the stock Fedora repositories…)

Personally, I'd recommend against using RPMforge unless you're familiar with the risks … I've run into problems merging their packages with the stock OS. RPMfusion, however, has generally proven to be “safe.”

Answer 3

YUM is the defacto RPM package management on RHEL (Centos) systems, and it works quite well once you get the hang of it- my very best suggestion is to familiarize yourself with YUM or use Debian...

That being said you can try to install one of these RepoForge packages (or set your /etc/yum/repos.d :D ) , then retry sudo yum install apt

http://pkgs.repoforge.org/apt/