deb packages (software sources) for old versions of Trisquel?

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coder
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Joined: 07/23/2017

Hello,

package repository at
http://packages.trisquel.info/
has deb packages only for trisquel versions 4, 6 and 7.

is there any place where packages for other old versions of trisquel are available? especially interested in packages for trisquel versions between 4 and 6 (that's 4.5, 5 and 5.5)

I managed to download install iso's for these older versions of trisquel from torrents (took months to do that :) ) but have to use packages and software sources for either trisquel 4 or trisquel 6 on these and they are not always usable because of dependency hell...

SuperTramp83

I am a translator!

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Joined: 10/31/2014

I can not help you but I'm curious, what is your goal, why are you exhuming old bones? :)

coder
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Joined: 07/23/2017

did you think that it might be an act of archaeology? ;)

there are a few other reasons but it might take me a lot of time and a whole wall of text to explain them, so I hope that you can trust me there is no easy way around it for me

jxself
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Joined: 09/13/2010

The packages.trisquel.info is not the repository; it is nothing more than a program for viewing things. The actual repository is at archive.trisquel.info and it appears to have things going back to Trisquel 2.0 LTS Robur. So you'd install whatever ISO you found and use the package manager to install as per usual, including apt-get source. And if you want to keep copies of the software for yourself, the program apt-mirror would be good to look into.

coder
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Joined: 07/23/2017

viewing (and manually searching) things (packages) is exactly what I want - any chance to tweak this tool to also work for discontinued versions of trisquel? it is really handy for what I want to do - searching for packages by name and reading about them, including full lists of their dependencies.

archive.trisquel.info seems to be an ftp server or something similar. I found a heap of packages (with source code) in /trisquel/pool/main but it seems to be all mixed together and sorted alphabetically...
how can I filter it by version of trisquel they were initially meant for?

installing with package manager works... partially )
I tried to install 2ping package with synaptics (on trisquel 5.5) and got 404 for it (two of its dependencies were found and installed though). after checking manually in web browser I found that earliest version of this package available in archive is 1.2.3 (that's for trisquel 6 toutatis) but synaptics lists earlier version of this package for earlier versions of trisquel - where should I look for these?

P.S. jxself, thanks for your reply, it clarified a bunch of things for me. including why I thought that package archives for older versions of trisquel are not available (because only some of them are available and I managed to unilaterally hit non-available ones on my first few attempts)

EDIT: tried looking for earlier versions of 2ping package on mirrors listed in readme on archive.trisquel.info: none of them contain older versions of it except http://mirrors.knoesis.org/trisquel/packages failed to open in my browser and http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/trisquel.info/pool/main/2/2ping/ (which appears to be owned by some commercial web hosting provider) contains only older versions of this package :)

now my question is: what apt string should I use in Software Sources utility to use http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/trisquel.info as my source of packages in synaptic and other package managers?

jxself
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Joined: 09/13/2010

"how can I filter it by version of trisquel they were initially meant for?"

Use that aptmirror program I was talking of.

Or, if you really do insist on doing everything the hard and manual way look into http://archive.trisquel.info/trisquel/dists/ and pick a thing like dagda-update or dagda-security or whatever. Go into that directory, then into Main, then into binary-amd64 (or binary-i386 depending on what system you're using) and the click on Packages. In there you'll find package names, dependencies, file names (like Filename: pool/main/a/apache2/apache2-doc_2.2.17-1ubuntu1.2_all.deb) and so from this you can known to go back to the pool directory and find that file.)

If you want the source packages you'll instead need to go into the source directory instead of binary-amd64 (or binary-i386). Those are compressed (sources.gz and source.bz2) do you won't be able to view them in your browser. Instead, download the sources file and decompress it. An example: If you download sources.gz do gunzip Sources.gz and you'll have a file called Sources. Open it with your favorite text editor and you can review it similar to the stuff for binary packages although it's a little different in that it only refers to a directory within the pool directory and lists files separately like a .dsc, .orig.tar.gz, .diff, etc. You'd need all of these to compile the package.

This is the all of same stuff that your package manager would read and do, so doing through the package manager will be much faster so as to automate all of these things.

"now my question is: what apt string should I use in Software Sources utility to use http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/trisquel.info as my source of packages in synaptic and other package managers?"

Use that very URL. You can use your existing /etc/apt/sources.list as an example.

The things that come after it like belenos or belenos-updates or belenos-security or whatever correspond to the directories that you see here http://archive.trisquel.info/trisquel/dists/

Then, things like "main" (or any other components) are named after the Release file after opening the belenos or belenos-updates or belenos-security or whatever directory.

coder
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Joined: 07/23/2017

jxself, thanks for your detailed answers!

this apt string worked for me to setup alternative archive as software source (for trisquel 5.5):
deb http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/trisquel.info brigantia main
unlike trisquel's official archive and other mirrors this one seems to contain all (or at least most) packages for "short term support" vesions of trisquel

my next struggle is to run trisquel's desktop in half-resolution (for exxample 960x540 resolution on 1920x1080 TFT panel) without blurring, as described here:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=159064
I managed to rebuild xrandr with lines 2886 - 2888 of its source code deleted (so that it would always use "nearest" filtering method).
Also can run it with ./xrandr command except it still seems blurry (or maybe my TN TFT panel is too low quality to clearly see the difference?).

Any ideas on how to test it in some non-subjective unambiguous way? (without using TFT TV sets with huge low-resoltion screens - I do not have easy access to these...)

autumnlover
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Joined: 02/23/2013

Old files (updates for Robur) seems to be indexed, but deb files seems not to be physically present there.

Issuing debmirror command like this:

debmirror --nosource -m --passive --host=archive.trisquel.info/ --root=trisquel/ --method=http --progress --dist=robur-backports,robur-security,robur-updates --section=main,extras --arch=i386,amd64 trisquel-robur-updates --ignore-release-gpg

produces "404 not found" errors for every file.

coder
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Joined: 07/23/2017

oldest version of trisquel for which I could find packages available publicly is 3.5, found it here:
http://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/trisquel.info

I could not find anything older so far, if anybody stumbles on it - please let me know!

autumnlover, why do you want to find packages for such an old version of trisquel? is it amateur (or even professional) archaeology or something else?

autumnlover
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Joined: 02/23/2013

I think it is related to my general interest into retro computing (8-bit, Amiga, MS-DOS PC-gaming). And since I have complete Ubuntu i386 repositories from 4.10 until 16.04 I also would like to have a complete set of Trisquel.

Thanks for pointing to that mirror. And while it seems not to have updates for 3.5 but...yay! It has a COMPLETE 2.0 Robur repo, not only base repository but updates as well! :)

coder
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Joined: 07/23/2017

glad it helped )
sadly I seem to be unable to edit my previous post to point out that this mirror does not contain packages for trisquel 3.5 (contrary to what I wrote there)