I have read several posts over the last few weeks about one of the new features in Feisty which is “command not found”. According to various sources if you type a command at the command prompt that isn’t found it will offer suggestions on it. For example, at a terminal I type: tilda (quake style terminal emulator). If I didn’t have it installed, normally you’d get a message saying “command not found” and that would be the end of it. However, in Feisty if I type the same thing the result is:



The program 'tilda' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:

sudo apt-get install tilda

Make sure you have the 'universe' component enabled

bash: tilda: command not found



Very cool, however I thought it wasn’t working as advertised. You see, I typed in my first name at the command prompt: paul. I got this as a result:



The program 'paul' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:

sudo apt-get install paul

Make sure you have the 'universe' component enabled

bash: paul: command not found



So I figured that it was just going to give me that same answer no matter what I typed and that it wasn’t really considering what packages could be installed. However, a quick look at Synaptic and sure enough there is a package named paul. Here is the package description for paul:

Yet another image viewer (displays PNG, TIFF, GIF, JPG, etc.)

paul = _P_rogram zur _A_uswertung und _U_mwandlung von _L_aserbildern

(for non German speakers: Program to evaluate and convert laser images).

Especially designed to work with gray scaled image sequences but may be

useful for any images. Using of imlib gives great flexibility of

file formats and is fast.

Features: move images until they match; cut images precisely;

create clickable HTML maps; 2D-FFT; operations onto single image or

set of images

So, shame on me for thinking this new feature was bogus. Turns out it really does know what packages are in the repository and what can be installed. If you type in something that is completely unavailable you get a plain “bash: command: command not found” with no offer to install.