Getting the latest OpenOffice and Mozilla versions while running Debian Stable.
Many of us are running stable because we want stability, we want everything to "just work" and not be exposed to too many bugs along the way. On the other hand, we also want the latest versions of the software we care about, typically the software we use everyday. This choice between stability and features is a fundamental tension in software deployment and indeed software development that can only really be resolved by "cherry picking" the latest versions of the important software and installing them into a stable distribution.
In Debian this is done using backports.org. Backports are, literally, the software from [http://www.debian.org/releases/unstable/ Debian unstable] ported back to work with Debian stable. backports.org is technically unofficial and unsupported, but the infrastructure which is used to build, maintain and use it is supported and backports.org is very widely used.
Debian uses a system called "pinning," so called because it allows (amongst other things) sysadmins to pin certain packages at particular versions while the rest of the system, is upgraded as normal. Dependencies are normally handled pretty well.
1. Select your packages
Work out which packages you want the latest versions of. In this example I'll be using the OpenOffice and Firefox families of applications, but backports.org has many thousands of packages available. Likely candidates include Thunderbird, subversion and [http://www.backports.org/package.php?search=kde-i18n KDE-i18n, translations of the KDE desktop system. This last is particularly important, because translation releases typically lag behind development releases and often translations miss the distribution release deadline.
2. Add backports.org to /etc/apt/sources.list
Add backports.org to your /etc/apt/sources.list like so:
#deb file:///cdrom/ sarge main deb http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/debian/ stable main deb-src http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/debian/ stable main deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main deb http://www.backports.org/debian/ sarge-backports main
The first line there is a hangover from the my installation of debian from a CDROM and can be removed. The next two lines are the location I get most of my packages from: a local debian mirror. The next line is the location of the security updates, this is very important because security updates appear there first. The last line is the new line I've added for backports. You will need to add a similar line to your file.
3. Give backports.org a low priority
Tell apt how important the bulk of the packages on backports.org are: not very. In the file /etc/apt/preferences (which you may need to create from scratch) add the following:
Package: * Pin: release a=sarge-backports Pin-Priority: 200
This can be read: "for all packages in the release "sarge-backports" set a priority of 200." The priorities range from 0 to above 1000, making 200 a low priority, thus ensuring that none of the backports packages will be installed unless you explicitly request it or they are required prerequisites of high priority packages.
4. Tell apt which packages you want
Explicitly tell apt which packages you want, again in the /etc/apt/preferences file:
Package: openoffice.org Pin: release a=sarge-backports Pin-Priority: 999 Package: firefox firefox, mozilla-firefox, mozilla-firefox-gnome-support, firefox-gnome-support, mozilla-firefox-dom-inspector, firefox-dom-inspector Pin: release a=sarge-backports Pin-Priority: 999
The exact package names can be found via the search engine at http://www.backports.org.
At this point you need to save and close all your applications likely to be affected by the upgrade, typically all running instances of Firefox and OpenOffice. If you need to keep reading these instructions, open them in a different flavour of web browser.
5. Run apt-get
Update apt's cache of which packages are where.
apt-get update
Purge the currently installed packages (this does not purge user data such as bookmarks, only system data). This command is rather complex because rather than purging specific packages, it is checking which packages are already on the system which match certain strings and un-installing those. This extra complexity is needed because I don't know what packages you already have installed.
apt-get remove --purge `COLUMNS=1000 dpkg -l | grep ^ii | awk '{print $2}' | grep "\(firefox\|openoffice\)"`
Lastly, install the new packages. The list of packages is the same as the list of packages in the /etc/apt/preferences file.
apt-get install firefox firefox mozilla-firefox mozilla-firefox-gnome-support firefox-gnome-support mozilla-firefox-dom-inspector firefox-dom-inspector openoffice.org
Now when you start OpenOffice or Firefox they should be the new version.
