dselect/aptitude/apt-get

**garyng** · 04-09-2003, 10:36 AM

How can I tell these application which distribution(woody/sarge/sid) to look for ? I have debootstrap a woody distribution but want to upgrade the applications to sarge/sid(or testing/unstable).

thanks in advance.

**RockMumbles** · 04-09-2003, 02:19 PM

edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file and change "stable" or "woody" to "testing" or "unstable", example:

Change the line:
deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian woody main contrib non-free
to:
deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
or:
deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free

HTH

rock

**garyng** · 04-10-2003, 11:27 AM

That works, thanks.

I noticed that KNOPPIX use a some what different method by listing all (stable/testing/unstable) sources and use apt.conf to control what default to choose from.

I am wondering if it this case, there is any application which present the information in a nice way such that I can from one single interface to choose which distribution to pick from. Or may be I need to fallback to apt-get(which is a command line utility) pick which distribution to download from.

**RockMumbles** · 04-10-2003, 02:26 PM

I only know and use apt-get, in knoppix since it has multiple repositories listed, ie: stable, testing and unstable; to install a package from the unstable repository you would use:

apt-get -t unstable install *packagename

Note: you would use " -t unstable " for sid, and " -t stable " for woody otherwise the default in apt.conf is used which is testing. My knoppix 3.1 1-20 release has the following line in /etc/apt/apt.conf:

APT:

efault-Release "testing";
...
so by default when you use apt-get install it would look in the testing repository.

HTH

rock