Synaptic is available in the so-called universe repository. If you cannot find that package, it means that you do not have universe enabled. To enable it, follow these steps:
GUI
Open Software Sources and select Community-maintained free and open-source software (universe)
After doing so, you will be asked to reload the software sources and you will be ready to install your package.
Terminal
Open the file /etc/apt/sources.list
:
sensible-editor /etc/apt/sources.list
And add the following three lines:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal-updates universe
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal-security universe
Note: I'm assuming that you are using Quantal (12.10). If this is not the case, then use lsb_release -c
to find the codename of your Ubuntu release and replace quantal
with that codename.
Then run sudo apt-get update
and install Synaptic.
sudo apt-get update
uname -s
outputuname -s
is going to help here, should probably runlsb_release -r
instead to find the version of Ubuntu