Posted by Steve on Tue 13 Sep 2005 at 17:41
If you're new to Debian you might be confused about how to get access to the Debian security updates. This short introduction tells you all you need to know.
To start with it helps if you are familiar with the way that Debian is released. Currently there are three flavours, or "branches" of Debian available:
As you can see there are three major flavours here. The simplest way to follow these names is to understand how they are used. The "order" of the releases is something like this:
Packages are uploaded to the unstable distribution, sid, and anybody running that distribution can get them almost immediately afterwards.
After a short wait if all the package dependencies are available, then the package is moved into testing. This can take 3, 5, or 10 days. But it is worth noting that this migration only occurs if all the dependencies of the relevant package are also available for testing.
At some point in the future the entire state of the Testing distribution will be frozen - and that will be released as the next Stable release. We don't know what the version number will be, but the next Stable release will be called "Etch".
Now that we've briefly explained the different distributions of Debian we can look at the security support.
If you're running Unstable there are no security updates available. Hopefully problems will be resolved by new uploads as soon as they are available - however even this is not gaurenteed.
The other two distributions, Stable and Testing, both have security support in place.
To gain access to the security updates you can use the standard Debian tools, apt-get, aptitude, or synaptic. To do this you just need to make sure your apt setup is correct.
apt will download and read from a list of "sources" to see which packages are available, and see their version numbers (which it must do to see if there are newer packages available than those present upon your current system).
The sources are configured by the file /etc/apt/sources.list, once configured correctly you can update your system by running:
apt-get update apt-get upgrade
(You can also use "aptitude update; aptitude upgrade" instead if you prefer - or synaptic.)
Stable Security SourcesTesting Security SourcesIf you are running the Debian Stable release, codenamed Sarge, then you should have the following listed in your sources.list file:
# # Debian Security Updates # deb http://security.debian.org/ sarge/updates main contrib non-free deb-src http://security.debian.org/ sarge/updates main contrib non-freeFor more details on Debian Stable's security handling please see the following URL:
If you wish to keep advised of security updates as they are released you can subscribe to the debian-security-announce mailing list - this receives a single message for each released advisory.
If you are running the Debian Testing release, which will eventually be released as the next stable release, Etch, then you should have the following listed in your sources.list file:
deb http://secure-testing.debian.net/debian-secure-testing etch/security-updates main contrib non-free deb-src http://secure-testing.debian.net/debian-secure-testing etch/security-updates main contrib non-freeThe security support for Testing is relatively new, and was announced on the 9th of September 2005.
For more details on the testing security support please see the following URL:
The intention is that the security repository is distinct from all others, and security updates will not contain new dependencies, or behave differently than the previous package did.
However it might be possible that this does not hold for "big" upgrades - such as Mozilla/Firefox (to pick a random example) - which can't be realistically handled by the team.
I think it is worth minimizing the software on any host you cannot devote personal and ongoing attention to .. if you can do that then cron-apt, or similar, might be able to do a good job for you.
Steve
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To be honest I'd just try removing them and seeing what broke ;)
The packages you have listed, apart from the kernel-headers, appear to be just libraries. I'd expect they could be removed if you have nothing depending upon them. If that is the case then using deborphan, or similiar, should help you out a lot.
Although I guess it depends how you ended up in this situation?
(And given the mention of Woody - do you intend to upgrade to Sarge soon? If so that might take care of all your problems for you!)
Steve
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Isn't oldstable, a.k.a. woody still officially supported, just like stable?
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You are not running Etch. Instead you're running what will become Etch when it is released. Right now it is just "testing".
If you're running testing then having the stable security updates is pointless, as your versions are already newer than the packages installed in stable.
You only need the testing-security lines listed, so you can remove/replace the stable line(s).
Steve
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It might be called Etch but that is with the understanding that testing will be frozen at some future point, and that frozen collection of packages will be the next stable release, called Etch.
It's probably not a big deal right now, but when Etch does get released anybody who continues to stick with testing will be confused when the name suddenly changes; it will also make diagnosing exactly which packages they have more difficult.
I should probably be less pedantic, sorry!
Steve
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You need to import the GPG key for apt to do checking with. See the following article for details:
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Alex
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