How can I check if a package is installed (no superuser privileges)

Question

At our university we can get almost any ubuntu package installed we want, but we are not superusers ourselves (we need to request packages being installed).

With some libraries it is not always easy to know whether the package is already installed or not. Is there a simple way/command to check this?

Answer 1

apt-cache policy <package name>

Answer 2

I always just use this from the command line:

dpkg -l | grep mysql

so the above asks dpkg to list all the installed packages and then I grep for only those that have mysql in the name.

Answer 3

One more variant, using aptitude this time:

aptitude show <package>

Tab completion works here as well.

Answer 4

You can use dselect. It provides non-su readonly access.

Also, dpkg -s provides a lot of details related to a package. Eg"

userme:~$ dpkg-query -s sl
Package: sl
Status: unknown ok not-installed
Priority: optional
Section: games