The Debian Project announced last day that the backports project is now an official Debian service available at backports.debian.org. Though dabian is famous for its stability, what it lacked is availability of new softwares in its repository. Since new versions of Debian comes in a slower pace as compared to others, Debian users have to wait long to use the newest version of softwares. So inducting backports to debian official means that users could easily install newest version of softwares.

Backports are packages from the testing distribution recompiled for the current stable (or even oldstable) release to provide users of the stable distribution with new versions of certain packages, like the Linux kernel, the Iceweasel browser or the OpenOffice.org suite, without sacrificing the overall stability of the system.The archive currently has 528 packages backported for the Lenny distribution. As the infrastructure to accept packages for the upcoming Squeeze release is already in place, this allows Debian Installer images to configure the backports repository by default without generating errors on user systems. The service for Squeeze will be enabled at a later date, after the release.

About backports

The backports service at www.backports.org was orginially started by Debian Developer Norbert Tretkowski with much support from team(ix). It was later continued and improved by Debian Developers Alexander Wirt (organisation) and Jörg Jaspert (technical support) to host over 500 backported packages for various architectures.

How to install from backports.

For new users

   1. Add this line

      deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports lenny-backports main

      to your sources.list ($ gedit /etc/apt/sources.lst ) [Run as root]

  2. Run apt-get update

For old users

Users of the old backports service should change their sources.list to point to

deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Note: with the integration into Debian's infrastructure the GPG key used to sign the backports repository has been changed to Debian's official FTP-master key.

How to install for Debian backports

$ apt-get -t lenny-backports install "package"

For example

$ apt-get -t lenny-backports install iceweasel

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