Tasksel – Install Group of Software in A Single Click or Single Command on Debian/Ubuntu

Tasksel is a handy tool for Debian/Ubuntu systems which will install Group of Software in a single click on your system. Tasks are defined in .desc files and located at /usr/share/tasksel.

By default, tasksel tool installed on Debian system as part of Debian installer but it’s not installed on Ubuntu desktop editions. This functionality is similar to that of meta-packages, like how package managers have.

Tasksel tool offer a simple user interface based on zenity (popup Graphical dialog box in command line).

Simply fire the below command to install Tasksel on Ubuntu based system

$ sudo apt-get install tasksel

To run tasksel from the command line, use the below command which will popup Graphical dialog box, similar to below screenshot.

$ sudo tasksel

Asterisk marked tasks are already installed. Scrolling down to see the list of available tasks. Press space bar to choose the appropriate task and hit ok to install, do the same for task removal too.

Command Line Usage

We can use tasksel command similar to other package managers such as apt & apt-get.

To see available tasks Front of every task you can see (i) & (u) : (i) indicate the installed tasks & (u) indicate the not installed tasks.

$ tasksel --list-task
i server        Basic Ubuntu server
i openssh-server        OpenSSH server
u dns-server    DNS server
u lamp-server   LAMP server
u mail-server   Mail server
u openstack     Openstack
u postgresql-server     PostgreSQL database
u print-server  Print server

Install a task using tasksel command.

$ sudo tasksel install lamp-server

Alternatively you can install tasks using apt-get command. caret (^) required at the end of the command in older versions of tasksel and not required in newer versions of tasksel.

$ sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

List the packages that are available on this group. In this example, it will display list of the packages going to install by lamp-server task.

$ tasksel --task-packages lamp-server
libmysqlclient18
apache2
php5-cli
apache2.2-common
apache2-utils
libswitch-perl
php5-common

Show the extended description of the given task.

$ tasksel --task-desc lamp-server
Selects a ready-made Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP server.

Remove a task using tasksel command.

$ sudo tasksel remove lamp-server

To know more about tasksel command, read the man page.

$ man tasksel

Enjoy…)