Can apt-get be used on Red Hat systems?

Solution 1:

There is a project out there that claims to support apt style repositories (as well as the apt-get command) on RPM based distros. It is called apt-rpm and is used as the default package manager on a few distros, though not on RHEL/Fedora.

Problems:

• It seems not to be really maintained since ~2008; it may have incremental patches or fixes since then, but nothing major.
• Yum repositories are not compatible with apt-rpm, so even if you were to install it on your computer, you would need an apt-rpm repository to connect to in order to use it.

There is a fork of apt-rpm that has been updated to be mostly compatible with rpm version 5, which is used in all recent RPM distros. So if you insist on using it, a good starting point is to check out the Gitorious branch for apt-rpm for rpm5.

The command syntax of yum is close enough to apt-get that you should be able to learn one if you know the other within a day, or at most, a week. So unless there is some very strong business need for using apt and you're willing to create your own apt-rpm repository (and deal with the cruftiness of software that's basically unmaintained), I would advise against proceeding down this train of thought.

Solution 2:

No, apt is Debian specific. apt uses dpkg to install .deb files (which are binary files that are specific to Debian).

Red Hat based Linux distributions uses the rpm package management system. You can use yum to retrieve and install rpms on Red Hat distributions:

 yum search som-package-name
 yum install some-package-name

If you want to install an rpm that you've downloaded on your own, you could use rpm -i some-package.rpm to install it (and rpm -qa to retrieve a list of all installed rpms). This is equivalent to dpkg -i some-package.deb (and dpkg --get-selections to retrieve a list of all installed deb packages) on Debian based distributions.