Mixed Systems

I have a system that requires the 2.6.3x kernel because it is the only one that supports the motherboards onboard NIC.

I tried it with karmic alpha but unsurprisingly I ran into stability problems so I am going back to Jaunty.

However, I still need to run the newer kernel. I could of course compile it myself but I really prefer not to. I could manually download the deb and then install it and all it's dependencies myself but that would probably cause as many instability problems as just nursing Karmic along.

So, a mixed system it is.

On Debian systems, this is simply done by adding "APT::Default-Release "version";" to your apt.conf file and sticking "stable". "testing" or whatever in as the "version".

We can't do this on Ubuntu because they use a different naming system to Debian. If we were to set "version" to "jaunty" then we would no longer receive security updates because in Ubuntu Land these come from ubuntu-security instead.

Fortunately, there is a way around this and here it is.

Firstly, we copy our existing "jaunty" sources.list to /etc/apt/sources.list.d

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d

Next, we change it to point to the "karmic" repositories.

sudo sed -i 's/jaunty/karmic/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sources.list

Create a Ubuntu style preferences file

sudo vi /etc/apt/preferences

Here is the contents of my preferences file, it should be fairly self explanatory;

Package: *
Pin: release a=jaunty
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: release a=karmic
Pin-Priority: 500

Package: *
Pin: release a=jaunty-updates
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: release a=karmic-updates
Pin-Priority: 500

Package: *
Pin: release a=jaunty-backports
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: release a=karmic-backports
Pin-Priority: 500

Package: *
Pin: release a=jaunty-security
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: release a=karmic-security
Pin-Priority: 500

Package: *
Pin: release a=jaunty-proposed
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: release a=karmic-proposed
Pin-Priority: 500

Finally, we update aptitude

sudo apt-get update

To install the kernel package from the karmic repository we first need to know what version we want

apt-cache search linux-image

The one I'm interested in is "linux-image-2.6.31-10-386"
I can just install this kernel using its full name

sudo apt-get install linux-image-2.6.31-10-386

To install packages from the Karmic repository I can use the -t distribution parameter

sudo apt-get -t karmic install packagename

Or I can specify a package version

apt-get install nautilus=2.2.4-1