I think i understand adding a link to /etc/apt/sources.list so apt knows to check there for packages. What i don’t understand is how to find those links.

For example: i know i want xed, a plain text editor. Wikipedia tells me that’s maintained by Linux Mint, but the Mint website doesn’t, as far as i can tell, have a link to a repository for installing Mint-specific packages in another distro (assuming that’s possible). It doesn’t mention what i might want to put in sources.list.

The same is true of Cinnamon, Mate, Xfce, KDE, and Gnome. If i install Debian and it doesn’t come with one of these listed in the aforementioned file (and it doesn’t), i have no idea how to get packages from that repository unless i can also find a downloadable .deb file and it has no dependencies from unknown repositories, or i download the entire desktop environment i want just a few packages from.

For context: i plan to install Debian without a DE and just get what packages i want from across several DEs. This will be hard to do if there are no software sources for apt.

Is this hard to find because it’s something that people who don’t know what they’re doing shouldn’t mess with? Am i just looking in the wrong places, or for the wrong thing?

One thing i’ve successfully installed with apt (as opposed to a .deb package) is LibreWolf, which i used extrepo for in accordance with the instructions on their website. Should i be using that instead for packages meant for specific desktop environments?

  • mifa201@lemmy.eco.br
    7·
    4 days ago

    Typically you shouldn’t use repositories from other distros in debian, only use repositories meant for that purpose. Packages have specific requirements, and their versions will probably differ between distros.

    The same is true of Cinnamon, Mate, Xfce, KDE, and Gnome. If i install Debian and it doesn’t come with one of these listed in the aforementioned file (and it doesn’t), i have no idea how to get packages from that repository unless i can also find a downloadable .deb file and it has no dependencies from unknown repositories, or i download the entire desktop environment i want just a few packages from.

    apt searches for packages listed in repositories defined in /etc/apt/sources.list, like you said, but nowadays mostly in .sources file inside /etc/apt/sources.list.d. In a regular install you should find there a debian.sources file with the main debian packages, which include all DEs you mentioned. For example, try: apt update && apt search cinnamon. You can browse the packages here: http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/. Repositories usually include sets of packages, not a single package/software. So don’t expect to find a repository for XFCE, another for GNOME etc. All these packages are available in the main Debian repo.

    You can add other .sources files to activate other repos. That’s actually what extrepo did for you, you should find a new .sources file related to librewolf.

    Regarding xed, that’s indeed not packaged in the Debian repos. You could try manually downloading the Linux Mint xed- packages (link), installing them with dpkg and see what happens, since that wouldn’t replace core debian packages. Or simply build them manually, there are even instructions for building a .deb package: https://github.com/linuxmint/xed#installation.

    For context: i plan to install Debian without a DE and just get what packages i want from across several DEs. This will be hard to do if there are no software sources for apt.

    You can try installing specific tools of some DE, but possibly that will download lots of libraries of that DE required by that specific tool (which shouldn’t be a big deal anyway). You can list the dependencies of a package with apt-cache depends ... to see what you need. There are also lots of software not designed for a specific DE and thus have less dependencies, maybe check what folks using minimalist window managers (like dwm, i3wm etc.) suggest.