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The Debian package manager has a large number of pretested packages that you can load
and run on the Bone. The Debian packages page provides details about the packages in the
current release of Debian. For example, the package page for git describes git and identi-
fies the version that will be loaded by running apt-get install git . The version
that apt-get installs might not be the most current version, but it is well tested.
What if you would like to run a newer version of a package? Debian has different releases
of packages that reflect different levels of testing. When a package is first entered into De-
bian, it is put in the Unstable release category. It lives here for a few days until it is tested
on the currently supported architectures and appears not to have any obvious bugs. It is
then moved to a Testing release, where further testing is done and bugs can be found. Fin-
ally, a new package can move to the Stable release if it is a significant enough upgrade.
At the time of this writing, Wheezy (version 7) is the current stable release, and Jessie (ver-
sion 8) is the Testing release. You can install packages from Jessie, but watch out: there is a
reason why it's called Testing.
For example, Wheezy uses version 1.7 of git , but version 1.8 of git introduced some
features that you want to use. Jessie uses version 2.0 of git , so you could upgrade to it
(details in a moment).
What if you don't want to risk upgrading a Testing release? You could use Wheezy-back-
ports. Backports are packages taken from the next Debian release, adjusted and recompiled
for use on the current release. For this example, version 1.9 of git is used in Wheezy-
backports.
To load either the Wheezy-backports or the Jessie packages, first run the following com-
mand to direct apt-get where to get the new packages:
bone# cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d
bone# echo "deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main
deb-src ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main" > \
wheezy-backports.list
bone# echo "deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie main
deb-src ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie main" > jessie.list
bone# echo 'APT::Default-Release "stable";' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/
local
bone# apt-get update
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