Installing suggested/recommended packages?

I ran the following code and got this package needs these packages, now it also says these packages are suggested, and theses are recommended. How do I get those up to install as well.

myusuf3@purple:/etc$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.0
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed: acroread ia32-libs lib32asound2 lib32bz2-1.0 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 lib32v4l-0 lib32z1 libaudio2 libc6-i386 libcurl3 libflac8 libhal1 liblcms1 libmng1 libogg0 libpulse0 libqt4-dbus libqt4-network libqt4-opengl libqt4-xml libqtcore4 libqtgui4 libsdl-ttf2.0-0 libsdl1.2debian libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsndfile1 libv4l-0 libvorbis0a libvorbisenc2 libx11-xcb1 nspluginwrapper
Suggested packages: libldap2 libgnome-speech7 lib32asound2-plugins nas liblcms-utils pulseaudio qt4-qtconfig
Recommended packages: pdf-viewer
The following NEW packages will be installed: acroread ia32-libs lib32asound2 lib32bz2-1.0 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 lib32v4l-0 lib32z1 libaudio2 libc6-i386 libcurl3 libflac8 libhal1 liblcms1 libmng1 libogg0 libpulse0 libqt4-dbus libqt4-network libqt4-opengl libqt4-xml libqtcore4 libqtgui4 libsdl-ttf2.0-0 libsdl1.2debian libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsndfile1 libv4l-0 libvorbis0a libvorbisenc2 libx11-xcb1 nspluginwrapper virtualbox-4.0
0 upgraded, 34 newly installed, 0 to remove and 26 not upgraded.
Need to get 168MB of archives.
After this operation, 460MB of additional disk space will be used.

Please and thank you

3 Answers

Recommends are installed by default (since Lucid). To negate this for a specific package, use apt-get --no-install-recommends install pkg. Suggests, however, are not. You can install the suggests for a single package installation by using apt-get -o APT::Install-Suggests="true" install pkg.

Installing conky without Suggests:

laney@iota> sudo apt-get install conky
[...]
Suggested packages: apcupsd moc mpd
The following NEW packages will be installed conky conky-all

…or with Suggests:

laney@iota> sudo apt-get -o APT::Install-Suggests="true" install conky
[...]
The following NEW packages will be installed apache2 apache2-doc apache2-mpm-worker apache2-suexec apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2.2-common apcupsd apcupsd-cgi apcupsd-doc ario ario-common conky conky-all icecast2 ices2 libao-common libao4 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap libcue1 libmpdclient2 libresid-builder0c2a libsidplay2 libsidutils0 moc moc-ffmpeg-plugin mpd

You can make this the default behaviour by putting

APT::Install-Suggests "true"

in a file in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/, for example /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/30install-suggests.

For the suggested packages, you can simply use the --install-suggests flag:

Consider suggested packages as a dependency for installing.
Configuration Item: APT::Install-Suggests.

instead of passing the option -o APT::Install-Suggests="true"
[ just like you have --install-recommends ]

Example:

sudo apt-get --install-suggests install mercurial

Add the option --install-recommends to your command:

sudo apt-get --install-recommends install virtualbox-4.0