DevNet suggests ATOM as a text editor for code, and it is pretty powerful especially when you add packages.
Unfortunately, I ran into some issues when looking to add it to my Ubuntu box and since DevNet has a CentOS walkthrough, it wasn’t very helpful. Once again, I turned to Google to find the answer. I’ll link the sources at the end.
As you can see, the directions cover yum which is a RedHat-based package installer. In Ubuntu, we use apt and dpkg. I went looking for an apt package for ATOM but it doesn’t exist. There are a couple options to get around this, we can add a link to the package to the apt-get list of sources, or we can just grab a .deb package if one exists. In this case, I grabbed the .deb package directly from ATOM’s website and used the gdeb package installer.
Once I downloaded the package from ATOM’s site with wget, I had some issues using dpkg. A little Googling revealed that gdebi is the preferred utility for installing single packages this way if apt doesnt have them in the list of available packages already. I needed to install the utility however.
Once gdebi was installed, the actual install of ATOM was pretty simple.
And here is the finished product:
I want to point out that ATOM also provides instructions for Ubuntu. In the fashion of true engineers, I discovered them after I had already gotten it done my own way. I’ll include those instructions as a reward for those who got this far.
ATOM Install Instructions for Ubuntu
I feel like it deserves mention as I learned from these instructions how to add repositories to serve as sources for packages that can be installed by apt as I mentioned earlier.
I went ahead and added the repository so I could use apt to keep the package up to date in the future. Notice how the apt-get update now lists the ATOM repositories.
After adding the repository, I did apt-cache pkgnames | grep atom to make sure it showed up.
Sources:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/159094/how-to-install-a-deb-file-by-dpkg-i-or-by-apt
