Whilst running Raspberry PI OS based on the stable version there are times when a package taken from the newer, testing, version may be required. As an example I required a newer version of LibreOffice.
Using a hybrid of stable and testing Raspberry PI OS can give the best of utilising the stable version with a limited number of packages taken from the testing version.
To do this the testing version is added along with the default setting of a reference to the stable version.
By default Raspberry PI OS utilises the version names, at the time of writing this was
- Buster = stable
- Bullseye = testing
Raspberry PI stores its apt list of repository sources here:
/etc/apt/sources.list
Below is shown the contents of the file with the addition of the additional option for Bullseye. I’ve also added comments for the release versions.
#10 (stable / Buster) deb archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/ buster main contrib non-free # Uncomment line below then 'apt-get update' to enable 'apt-get source' #deb-src archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/ buster main contrib non-free ############################################################################# #11 (testing / Bullseye deb archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/ bullseye main contrib non-free # Uncomment line below then 'apt-get update' to enable 'apt-get source' #deb-src archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/ bullseye main contrib non-free
To configure the default repository add the file
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00local
To include the default choice, eg. to set the stable, Buster, version as the default
APT::Default-Release "buster";
Packages can be installed as usual using:
apt install firefox
Packages from the testing (Bullseye) release can then be added using an extra parameter (-t along with the release version)
apt install libreoffice -t bullseye
Notice the use of -t and the version reference to use the different version. Must be included within the list in /etc/apt/sources.list.
With a change to the file specifying the default repositories and the addition of another file setting the default repository a hybrid apt system, utilising stable and testing, can be created.
