406. Briefly: Missing package in debian wheezy -- forgot apt-pinning settings

In the off-chance that someone for some reason has made the same mistake as I have...

Wheezy is now stable and while that's all fine and dandy, when trying to install tor I kept on getting errors along the lines of

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package tor is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

aptitude show tor

gave

No current or candidate version found for tor
Package: tor
State: not installed
Version: 0.2.3.25-1
Priority: optional

and

apt-cache policy tor

tor:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: (none)
  Version table:
     0.2.3.25-1 0
        -10 http://ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/ wheezy/main amd64 Packages

I got similar errors for e.g. wine and virtualbox.
The solution is in the output of apt-cache -- I set up apt-pinning a long time ago (for mpich2?) and forgot about it.

cat /etc/apt/preferences

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 990

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: -10

Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: -10

Well, wheezy is now stable (and I am tracking wheezy only in my sources.list now) so the problem was quickly solved by simply deleting /etc/apt/preferences.

405. First breakage in Debian Jessie? less vs man-db

Update 12/5/13: less 456 is in the debian repos now so the breakage is resolved:
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=less

For some reason less (<456) and man-db conflict. man-db in turn is a requirement for yelp, which is a requirement for gnome-core which is a requirement for gnome. In other words, you currently have a choice between less or gnome.

More here: http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org/msg1117622.html

verahill@debianstd:~/tmp/poppler_build$ sudo apt-get install less

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  gnome gnome-core gnome-user-guide man-db yelp
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  less
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 5 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/135 kB of archives.
After this operation, 29.4 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

404. Briefly: Debian Jessie now out (sort of, and in places)

update 6/5/13: The first upgrades and dist-upgrades are now in jessie. Nothing particularly exciting, beyond a new lsb_release package. As far as I can tell the gnome desktop background hasn't been touched either, but if memory serves me right the themes for the new stable is decided around the time of the freeze of testing, so there're another 2-3 years to go.

update: jessie is now at ftp.au.debian.org too

Original post
ftp.us.debian.org now has a copy of jessie, even though ftp.au.debian.org still doesn't.

This means that you can switch to the new testing (jessie) by editing your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org jessie main non-fre

At this point jessie is simply a copy of the 'old' testing, wheezy, so if you've got an up-to-date wheezy there are currently no updates involved in switching to jessie.

If I've understood things right sid was frozen at the same time as wheezy, so that it will take a little while before changes will occur in jessie since they first need to be introduced to sid, and then filter through.

Note that once updates start flowing into jessie the odd breakage might occur, so make sure to install apt-listbugs to get warnings about known bugs.

---

Upgrading from Squeeze to Wheezy
Upgrading from the old stable to the new stable is simple enough.

First make sure that Squeeze is up to date

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and replace all instances of squeeze with wheezy. Then update, and download all updates before upgrading (-d).

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -d
sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

If you get an error about default-jre you can uninstall openjdk-6-jre and then run dist-upgrade again. It should work.