I just recently did a fresh install of Debian Lenny, but when I tried to locate something, I got the following error:

-bash: locate: command not found

This is because you need to separately install locate, or even better, mlocate which is much faster apparently.

Doing this is simple, you just need to do 2 things…

Firstly, apt-get install mlocate to grab and install the mlocate stuff. Finally, you must run the updatedb command.

Viola, that’s it, short and sweet, now you can locate away!

Also worth mentioning is the purge option with apt-get, e.g. apt-get remove app_name –purge, which completely removes an application and all its configuration files. Or if you want to cleanup after removing an application, run apt-get clean.