Repo mix-and-match hit parade

[spacex]

It's not that we suffer from the new shiny shit syndrome, but more that we love a bumpy ride. Stable is boring by definition, and it's no point to use stable for anything that doesn't need to be stable. But nowadays nothing is unstable in debian. Sid is solid as a rock.

[millpond]

But people can be easily led astray by the google debbil.

An example from just a few minutes ago:

It seems that dd is no longer reliable to create a boot USB stick from the M$ crap. Wot with all that putzing around with boot partitions and bios nonsense.

To use it you first need to use a program called isohybrid.

Command not found, on Jessie.

Searched synaptic for the package name - not found.
Googled it on Debian and found it in syslinux-utils, where it was listed as being a component in Stretch, and SID, but not in Jessie backports. .
Downloaded the source from the ftp site, and before backporting it, decided to check again.

It was indeed in the standard Jesse repo, but somehow I had forgotten to load its package. I found it by simply peeking inside the package with mc on a local mirror.

The average person hasnt a clue as to backporting, or how to 'peek' inside package contents.
Alot of our skills have been acquired through years and experience, and I am *always* finding new and often totally surprizing stuff that makes my head spin.
And making dumb mistakes....

So a critical lesson I learned before potentially making a mistake was not to trust synaptic, and probe likely packages for missing utilities.

People should also learn to be wary of updates. The latest Jesse version of unetbootin (for bootable USB sticks) will not find any pen drives that are formatted with mkfs-ntfs necessary to boot into Win They need the older 494 version for the capability. As the new version will only recognize FAT formats, it could lead to a potential disaster if the USB drive that showed was an external USB drive formatted as FAT to avoid permissions problems. ....

This is just one example of many. Too often i find mysaelf hunting down older versions of programs simply because they work better. Or are less bloviated with crap.

[edbarx]

To search the contents of Debian packages I use:
https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_contents

[fireExit]

Searched synaptic for the package name - not found.
Googled it on Debian and found it in syslinux-utils, where it was listed as being a component in Stretch, and SID, but not in Jessie backports. .
Downloaded the source from the ftp site, and before backporting it, decided to check again.

It was indeed in the standard Jesse repo, but somehow I had forgotten to load its package. I found it by simply peeking inside the package with mc on a local mirror.

The average person hasnt a clue as to backporting, or how to 'peek' inside package contents.

Code: Select all

acp syslinux-utils
syslinux-utils:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 3:6.03+dfsg-5
  Version table:
     3:6.03+dfsg-5 0
        500 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie/main amd64 Packages


it might be a possible problem with other packages/lib but not this one;
it's available in main in both amd64 and i386 arch in jessie, stretch and sid;
anyone with a sane, standard sources.list would find it.

[millpond]

I was actually searching for *isohybrid* .

I believe apt has a utility for displaying package info, not sure about imcluded files.
I dont use them because my file manager is quicker. (at least for me...)

Point being in all this is to double check that packages are needed, and to acknowledge that sometimes off-distro ones are.

[steve_v]

The average person hasnt a clue as to backporting, or how to 'peek' inside package contents.

What about 'apt-file search isohybrid'?
Or search contents on-line.
For backporting, it's all on the wiki, or just use google.

[stevepusser]

...
The average person hasnt a clue as to backporting, or how to 'peek' inside package contents.
...

File-roller and Ark, and probably others, allow the user to easily peek inside or extract a .deb package.

[stevepusser]

viewtopic.php?f=30&t=124138#p589139

Code: Select all

deb http://repo.steampowered.com/steamos alchemist main contrib non-free
deb-src http://repo.steampowered.com/steamos alchemist main contrib non-free

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian wheezy main
deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu wily main universe
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian sid main
deb http://http.debian.net/debian wheezy-backports main
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main contrib non-free

root@steamos:/home/desktop# cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*
deb [arch=amd64,i386] http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ precise steam
deb-src [arch=amd64,i386] http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ precise steam


With predictable results.

[spacex]

^ At least he got balls. But I agree, it's a bit ambitious. You got to concentrate to apt-pin that list

[GarryRicketson]

Here is a new one, just notice to day ,
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=124090&p=589196#p589193
A little Ubuntu, and just to complicate it, more, a unstable version of mint , "romeo"

[Head_on_a_Stick]

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=124248

[Randicus]

debian stable
debian testing
debian unstable
debian experimental
Knoppix
deb-multimedia.org squeeze
ppa.launchpad.net

But not to worry. It is technically Wheezy.
Priceless.

[dasein]

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=124248

Wow. It's going to be very hard for anyone, anywhere, anytime, to top that one. It deserves a special place of honor in the initial post.

It's remarkable that the machine hasn't spontaneously combusted.

And the OP in that thread still has no clue how badly FUBAR his system is. Amazing.

(OTOH, maybe spacex could use that thread as an opportunity to demonstrate once and for all how easy successful repo-mixing really is. )

[stevepusser]

Yeah, now he's going on about his amd64 version of pipelight not working, so he's going to try the i386 version on amd64. I wonder if he's realized it needs a patched version of wine called wine-staging.

Still won't believe an "all" package is arch-independent, too.

Steve (got pipelight working in the MEPIS repo, but he's on his own...)

[IG-89]

I now fully understand why dasein, et al., were royally pissed at me............