backports for a rolling distro?

[blinkinell]

Hi,

What I'm making is Blinkports which will be a desktop oriented backports style repo for Mint. For now at least that means pulling in packages from unstable, experimental, and mirroring other useful packages. Setting it up manually at first will be fairly simple I think, especially since there isn't much original work on the packaging, but there should be some challenges later on. I realize there is the Imports repo, but I'll need to do something like this before I could be useful to that.

Kernel

http://zen-kernel.org/
http://liquorix.net/

If you want to give it a go install the kernel and headers:

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aptitude install linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64 linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64

No point in duplicating the good work here, but should be mirrored.

Nvidia Drivers

I have been using apt pinning to get the latest versions from experimental, but this would be better done with a repo , and would be complimentary to things like Jockey too.

If you want to evaluate the stability of the drivers in the experimental branch you can do this, use at your own risk its working for me but if you can't rescue your system from a broken X config I would not recommended (or at least have a look on how to do that first)

taken form my own system, YMMV

in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

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Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Video Card"
    Driver              "nvidia"
EndSection

in /etc/apt/sources.list

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deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free

in /etc/apt/preferences.d/nvidia

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Package: nvidia-glx
Pin: release n=experimental
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: nvidia-kernel-dkms
Pin: release n=experimental
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libgl1-nvidia-glx
Pin: release n=experimental
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libgl1-nvidia-glx-ia32
Pin: release n=experimental
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: nvidia-vdpau-driver
Pin: release n=experimental
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libcuda1
Pin: release n=experimental
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libcuda1-ia32
Pin: release n=experimental
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: libnvidia-compiler
Pin: release n=experimental
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: nvidia-smi
Pin: release n=experimental
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: nvidia-opencl-icd
Pin: release n=experimental
Pin-Priority: 900

then install with

aptitude update && aptitude install nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel-dkms libgl1-nvidia-glx libgl1-nvidia-glx-ia32 nvidia-vdpau-driver libcuda1 libcuda1-ia32

the exact same thing would work for unstable too, but you would also want this in the pinning file so you don't pull everything from unstable (although they are the same as testing at the moment):

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Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 1

Friefox 4 - using the Mozilla binaries, just like Ubuntuzilla but this is for Debian.

compat-wireless - if you want to stick with the stock kernel but need some wireless drivers this will help - pre-compiled or a fetch/compile/install script are options here - anyone found or written anything?