Create your own Xfce 4.10 repository in Debian Testing

If you are a user of Debian Testing, and also, you use Xfce as Desktop Environment, you should know that there is a very simple way to use the latest stable version (4.10), creating your own custom repository.

The problem is, that still Xfce 4.10 is on the branch Experimental de Debian, but it can be used perfectly in Testing following the steps I describe below.

1.- Installing the necessary packages.

The first thing to do is install reprimand, a simple tool that allows us to build repositories with packages .deb. This tool is currently in the repositories, so we open a terminal and put:

$ sudo aptitude install reprepro

2.- Lowering the .deb.

For this tutorial to take effect, we are assuming that we already have installed Xfce 4.8, since what we need precisely, is to download the updates. Now what we need is to get the packages from Xfce from the repositories of Debian-Experimental. We add to our file / Etc / apt / sources.list the following line:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main

Then we save the changes, we open the Synaptic Package Manager, we update, and we should leave to update some packages Xfce (we must make sure they point to version 4.10). If we get to this point without problems, we mark all to install, but, when applying the changes, we only select the option to Download only the packages, as you can see in the following image:

With this option, what we will do is download the packages to the cache of apt. It would be prudent that, before doing this, we have the cache folder empty, or at least with the least amount of packages possible, so as not to make mistakes when extracting only the ones we need later. The cache of apt It is located in / Var / cache / apt / archives.

Once the packages related to Xfce, we remove them from the apt cache, and we put them in any folder, for example:

$ cp /var/cache/apt/archives /home/<usuario>/

3.- Creating the repositories.

As I told you, it is advisable to only have the packages Xfce When creating the repository, for a matter of organization and space more than anything, but it does not matter if we have more packages, anyway, this will not affect us at all, since aptitude o synaptic, they take into account the newest packages when updating, and if there are any duplicates it will not take them into account.

Now what we will do is use reprimand to create our custom repository. Reproach It's great, since it creates the structure of a repository for us without us having to do practically anything. I am not going to go into the details of how to use it, but I will show you the fast track to achieve our goal.

We go to the folder that we copied from the apt cache:

$ cd /home/<usuario>/

We create the necessary configuration folder for reprimand:

$ mkdir conf/

Then we create the file that will give reprimand the necessary instructions for us to create the repository.

$ cd conf/
$ nano distributions

And inside the file we put:

Origin: Xfce-Packages
Label: Xfce-Packages
Suite: testing
Codename: testing
Architectures: i386
Components: main
Description: Mirror personalizado de Xfce 4.10 para Debian Testing

Then we save and exit the conf folder:

$ cd ..

Now we run represent, inside the archive folder as follows:

reprepro --ask-passphrase -b . -V -C main includedeb testing *.deb

If everything goes well, you will see how it creates the directories for us dist y pool just like in a conventional repository.

To make everything more beautiful, we are going to change the name of the folder archives a xfce. Now we just have to add to our sources.list:

deb file:///home/<usuario>/xfce testing main

We remove the line that points to Experimental, update and voila, we can install Xfce 4.10 from our own repository 😀