Dear Developers, since a few months [1] the backports service [2] has become officially supported by the Debian Project. In the spirit of clarifying responsibilities and resource access control within Debian, here is (between dashed lines below) the long overdue delegation for the backports team [3].

Turmoil in the free-office-suite world has led to the formation of the Document Foundation and its forking of OpenOffice.org into LibreOffice, and much if not most of the Linux world has declared its support for the more-community-oriented LibreOffice.

There’s a thing about Debian… it’s super stable, but the devs always want newer software, so if they need Ruby you have a choice of compiling it from source as I previously described here or better using the Debian Backports.

The Backports Team is pleased to announce the availability of a new suite on backports: lenny-backports-sloppy. Please read carefully before considering using or uploading to it what this entails.

If you are running Debian Lenny, the best way to install Virtualbox OSE is to use the version available in the Debian backports. For those who have installed the previous release (3.0.12), please check the availability before updating

Backports service becoming official – The Debian Project is proud to announce that the backports service, previously available at www.backports.org [1] is now an official Debian service available at backports.debian.org [2].

Recently I’ve been using Debian backports to update versions of some applications- Pidgin, Transmission, Open Office. I’d come across a few recommendations to upgrade the kernel, but had trouble finding a simple guide to doing so.

If you work with a Debian Lenny, you may want to use a software whose version is more recent that the one available in the Lenny repositories. This is easy if you use the Debian backports.

I don’t buy to the view that Debian Stable is outdated. If you are running a server this much older packages and slow updates are a blessing. Moreover, you can catchup to the latest and greatest packages even on desktop.

If you are willing to do a little bit of work you can shoehorn the latest code into a package yourself without needing any special knowledge of how to create packages. Note this will only work with programs that already have been packaged since it re-uses the old packaging info with the new code.