Hardy Heron Users Are Forced to Upgrade?
Two days after the official launch of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, I took the decision to upgrade my 8.04 to 8.10. Everything went fine until it gave a message telling me something like there’s no supported driver for my video card. I stopped the upgrade because the last time I got a message like that I had a hard time editing files from the command line.
Although Ubuntu 8.04 is an LTS distribution, sites and software developers that provide .deb packages are slowly stopping the offering of packages for Hardy Heron. I don’t think this is a clever move, because there are still many users who preffer Hardy Heron and will not upgrade to 8.10 Intrepid Ibex pretty soon. By doing this, the users who want to have the latest versions of their favorite apps will have to compile them from source which might create some problems in time if the process doesn’t go the right way.
These are my 2 cents on the “forced” upgrade issue. Keep in mind that this is just my opinion, maybe I’m paranoid, maybe I’m right… You decide:).
posted: 08 November 18
under: Ubuntu
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports
There’s a couple of ways around this. If your package is available in Backports, you can install the individual .deb from there. If they don’t have what you need, you can request a backport, but if its not a popular package or overly complex it might not be accepted — or at least take a long time.
Once you’re familiar with the Backports project, you’ll probably want to add the repository to your system. I highly recommend the “pinning” feature described in this document so you select only the backports you need; your best bet is to stick to the original Hardy packages for the ones which you don’t need a more recent version.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=268687
I was in a situation where packages I wanted (tcl, tk, amsn) weren’t available in backports, so I used the above post to make my own. It took a while for me to figure it out, download the build environment, and test the results. It worked surprisingly slick and was a fun project. Definitely YMMV, and I’d imagine that there are a lot of packages this method won’t work properly for.
Me, for example, only use LTS releases. No major reason behind this, but I don’t have patience to be updating every time there is a release.
With the backports repository enabled, I get to use more recent versions of the software, if it’s needed. Most of the time, just the 4 main ones are enough.
If you want the latest and greatest software, why are you using an old version of Ubuntu?