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Roger

Member

From: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Registered: 2019-04-06

Posts: 67  

Website

How to download alternate kernels

Forgive my ignorance, but I am having trouble persuading dpkg or apt to download an updated kernel for testing. I simply want to get the beowulf version without changing my sources.list and having apt then want to upgrade everything else. There must be a simple command to download a specific *.deb file from the repository. What is it?

ToxicExMachina

Member

Registered: 2019-03-11

Posts: 210  

Re: How to download alternate kernels

Two simple steps:

1. First, you have to add a new repository config into /etc/apt/sources.list.d so you don't need to modify sources.list at all. This is very easy way to add new repository as a separated config.
2. According to "man apt-get" you can use the following command:

apt-get -t beowulf --download-only install package_name

Another ways:

1) You can use custom config for apt-get. The command line key is "-c". In this the config where you can specify configuration files like another sources.list. I think in this case it's inefficient way but it may be a good one for some situations.
2) There is a tool called aptly. You can even mirror a subset of repository with it.
3) Go to any Devuan mirror via web browser and download package manually.

Roger

Member

From: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Registered: 2019-04-06

Posts: 67  

Website

Re: How to download alternate kernels

Thanks very much. What I was missing was that one can control which parts of sources.list are used with entries in an
/etc/apt/preferences file, and that those preferences can be overridden by a -t flag to apt-get. Of course one also has to run apt-get update to get access to sections added to sources.list

I can now install selected items from the beowulf release into a system running ascii. In principle I am happy to stay with the current stable release, but I am planning for a possible problem with outdated device drivers installing Devuan onto a new computer. I have had problems like that before with ethernet and video. That was several releases ago, and Linux seems much better these days in being up to date with hardware.