Trying to use multiple Debian repositories

Question

General situation:

I need to port a Qt project from MS Visual Studio 2010 to Linux (Debian). In VS 2010 I have Qt v.4.8.1, but in Debian it is Qt v.4.6.1. This difference prevents me from porting, as some features are not present in 4.6.1.

In Debian I am using the stable Squeeze repository. My experience with this OS, and Linux in general, is zero.

The Issue:

Because the highest available version of Qt in the Squeeze repo is 4.6.1, I decided to enable multiple repositories, and get the more recent package from Wheezy instead.

To add Wheezy I performed the following actions:

1. Edited /etc/apt/sources.list, where I included:

   • deb http:// ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main deb-src http://
   • ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main

2. Edited /etc/apt/apt.conf.d*:

   • APT::Default-Release "stable"
   • APT::Cache-Limit "50000000"

However, it hasn't worked. I can't select the needed package from Wheezy because when I open Synaptic I get this error:

Wow, you exceeded the number of descriptions this APT is capable of

I don`t know how to solve with this problem.

All I need is to upgrade Qt in Debian. Am I doing this the hard way? Is there a much simpler solution?

Answer 1

First of all, you can take a look at the versions available for the package you want to upgrade with this command :

apt-cache show qt4-desiger | grep Version

You can also use http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=qt4-designer

You can then force the installation of a given version by doing :

apt-get -uVf install qt-designer=4:4.8.2+dfsg-2

or

apt-get -uVf -t wheezy install qt-designer

Both options should display the packages that will be upgraded, take care to see if the list is not too long (if it is consider upgrading your whole system to wheezy - or finding a squeeze backport for your package).