How install xfce >= 4.10 from backports repository in debian

Question

I am working in Debian 7 64bits with xfce 4.8

But in backports repository I found xfce 4.10.1

and I added this line in my sources.list:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main contrib non-free

but when I upgrade I do not see that can be updated.

Then, how I can upgrade xfce 4.8 to 4.10 cleanly with backports? without tricks like adding repo of debian 8 testing or others.

Greetings.

Answer 1

Add the Mepis Repo to /etc/apt/sources.list (Mepis is based on Debian Stable):

deb http://main.mepis-deb.org/mepiscr/xfce/ xfce-4.10 main 

Run aptitude update

Import the repo key & install the backport:

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 81E77EAF14E225A0
gpg --armor --export 14E225A0 | apt-key add -
apt-get -t xfce-4.10 install xfce4

The Mepis Community Repo also builds for both 32 & 64 bit:

deb http://main.mepis-deb.org/mepiscr/repo/ mepis12cr main non-free 

With this method you can still keep sysvinit & avoid systemd.

To subsequently apply updates to xfce 4.10 you need to:

aptitude update && aptitude upgrade

Answer 2

The existence of the deb file there doesn't mean that the file can be used for all releases. The files there are used by everything from squeeze to experimental. In this case, in wheezy-backports, the only xfce4-related package is xfce4-weather-plugin, where version 0.8.3 was backported to wheezy.

For you to get XFCE 4.10, you will have to use another repo.