How do I install a program from terminal with no errors?

Question

Whenever I try to install something through terminal, I try to do it the same way I did it last time. Let's say the program "Samba" here is what I do: sudo apt-get install "samba" It says that their is no such package! What's going on? Did I type something wrong?

Answer 1

You don't need to use quotes. You might want to make sure everything is updated and upgraded first too.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install samba

Answer 2

Maybe your package cache is out of date. Please try the following command first:

sudo apt-get update

The quotes around "samba" are not necessary unless the package name contains spaces (what should never be the case), but using quotes should be no problem.

If it doesn't work after this command line, please read the output from this command. Maybe you have an error in your package sources definition file (/etc/apt/sources.list) - sometimes this is caused by adding a malformed PPA line or by editing this file manually. You can set a line to ignore by prepending a #. Another possibility could be the opposite of the above - if an important line is set to ignore. After editing the sources.list, you must do the update - command line before installing.