I'm currently running lenny and I dont want to upgrade my whole system to sid, but occasionally I want a program thats only in sid, like the latest version of pidgin. Whats the best way to get one application from unstable and keep it updated but not update my whole system to unstable? (I'm a new debian user, and new to linux in general too).

If the program doesn't have dependencies (which is unlikely), you can just download the .deb file and install it:
if it has dependencies, it won't install (read: it will install, but very probably won't work, if you force it to) unless you also install the dependencies (other software that it needs). A lot of new programs (new as in from a newer version of the distribution) are based on newer libraries than older versions, so getting a single program from new version of your distribution to run on an older version usually does require you to upgrade also the libraries it depends on, or other software. Shortly said, usually you can't just install one program, but you do need to install more in order to get it working.

You can of course download the single deb file(s), force them to install if possible and see if it works or not. It probably won't, but then you can try to get the dependencies one at a time and do the same, and see how much it takes to get it run. My guess is that you'll end up downloading and installing them all, thus upgrading a big part of your system - easier done if you just install the whole new OS, using the "clean install" method which involves formatting root partition.

As for Pidgin, it's not much more (yet) than Gaim, except that they had to change some names because of lawsuits..maybe it'll be "more" in the future, but right now you can just as well use Gaim if you have it. It looks the same as the last version of Gaim, and acts the same.

Look at apt-pinning before mixing packages from multiple versions of Debian...

http://wiki.serios.net/wiki/Apt-Pinning_on_Debian


Basically you would pin the apt repositories with different priorities. then add the repositories to your sources list. then update and install the specific packages you want.

Be aware that due to dependencies you can still break your system like this.




another option is backports.org. where the new versions of software are compiled to use the libraries that are already in Debian Stable...

This is how I think it should be done. Howto: Set up and Maintain a Mixed Testing/Unstable System

Also, at least for Pidgin, it's now in Testing. So if you just have the Testing repo in sources.list when you do aptitude search pidgin it will come up with a list of pidgin and all the assorted plugins possible.

I just did aptitude install pidgin pidgin-this-plugin pidgin-that-plugin, etc, etc. (Not literally, you need to type in the actual plugins listed there from aptitude search, not this and that!)

What aptitude did was remove Gaim and replace it with Pidgin and all those plugins. That must have been changed recently because I remember people complaining about aptitude needing to remove a meta-package and some other important packages when folks wanted to have it remove Gaim. Now it just replaces Gaim with Pidgin, which is nice. Logout and in or do an update-menu and Pidgin appears in the appropriate places in the menu. The next time I did an aptitude safe-upgrade and aptitude full-upgrade (I do this nearly every day) aptitude also removed the Gaim configuration data files automatically. You can do that right away to get it over with.

For stuff you absolutely want from Unstable, Rickh's guide is really the way to go. No need for messing with an apt preferences file with all those confusing numbers. You just set your default in apt.pref (which you might not have yet, I don't since I haven't done this yet) and add all the repos to sources.list and aptitude will always keep track of this automatically for you. You just specify /unstable after the package name to get it from unstable instead of the default testing, and aptitude will get whatever associated dependencies it needs from unstable along with it. Then, when the package gets released to testing with the same or higher version aptitude will automatically get what it needs for that package from the default testing repo. Pretty cool!

Apt.pref is not the same as apt.preferences! Read his guide and do a bit more reading and you (probably) will be able to accomplish this easily.

apt.conf ... /etc/apt/apt.conf

Oh yeah. Serves me right trying to give advice from memory when I'm still new at this stuff myself.

Hopefully he read your how-to and so my attempt to help would be clarified by the CORRECT name of the file.

I just thought that a little more information and some ideas about what to read up on would be helpful to him.

I just played around with the Knoppix 5.2 DVD last night and experimented with setting things up using your guide.

Worked fine once I figured out the correct repos to type. I had to keep going back into my actual Debian install (accessed read-only by Knoppix) and correcting myself. Again, I was doing it by memory and so didn't have your guide in front of me. Just didn't want to search through my stacks of thousands of computer information printouts to find it.

I didn't actually complete it because even that cache Knoppix uses to buffer the DVD to create more space and whatever it uses on my actual Debian drive's swap partition ran out of space. Aptitude didn't have room for the huge amount of software needed for the aptitude upgrade. But I could see it was grabbing things from the correct repos! So I consider that experiment as being successful enough. I was just playing around anyway.

I set a Knoppix user password and a root password just in case it asked me for one when logging out and in. I've used Live cd's before that wouldn't allow anyway to log back in again. On this version of Knoppix anyway it didn't even ask me, just logging me back in automatically.

I did that right away as even though knoppix lang=us gives the us keyboard layout, KDE KControl's regional settings need to be switched as well to get the rest of the system and software set to US English. And that takes logging out and in after changing the setting.

What concerned me was although I used su - to do superuser tasks it still never prompted me for a password at all! And software that should require a password never asked either, just doing anything as if I was root. That can't be right!

And I had no idea what to put in the blank space in the Knoppix firewall settings it leaves open for you to type the commands into. I had used YaST in OpenSUSE and Firestarter in Debian and so have no clue what the iptables commands are to run a nice default configuration. So I was completely unprotected! Of course, only the current DVD cache was writable and not my hard drives so no harm could be done but still.

I've got the info in books but sure like Firestarter to do it for me. Comes from my lazy, GUI loving Windows background!

Anyway, thanks for the correction and also of course for the wealth of info I've read from your posts over at the Debian forums. I've learned a great deal from them. Just wish my memory worked like it used to!