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I'd like to have your advice on yet another pinning problem that hit me recently. I've been through man apt_preferences several times, and I can't find anything wrong in what I did.

I was having kernel panics in Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), when I decided that I wanted to use packages from Debian Wheezy to get a newer kernel that could fix them.

I decided to try with pinning. The plan was to add a deb source for wheezy, and pin it with a very small priority, so that Wheezy packages would be installed only if explicitly requested for. Then, I would install the kernel-image from Wheezy.

I added this source:

deb http://ftp.uninett.no/pub/linux/debian wheezy main contrib non-free

And this pin:

Explanation: Disable Wheezy
Package: *
Pin: origin "ftp.uninett.no"
Pin-Priority: 1

But didn't work. I tried several other approaches like:

Explanation: Disable Wheezy
Package: *
Pin:  release o=Debian,n=wheezy
Pin-Priority: 1

or even

Explanation: Disable Wheezy
Package: *
Pin:  release n=wheezy
Pin-Priority: 1

No matter what, and even with negative priorities, Wheezy packages still had the same priority (500) as the LMDE's, and they were preferred to LMDE's since they were newer.

Can you see anything that I missed so far?

PS: If you're interested in the specific panic problem, you can read the full story here

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    Never used Mint, but did you check /etc/apt/preferences.d/*? The answers here might be relevant: serverfault.com/questions/357052/how-can-i-apt-pin-stable
    – Cosimo
    May 8, 2013 at 16:04
  • The answer is not completely relevant by itself, and there is nothing in preferences.d, but maybe it pointed me to the right direction: there is a preferences file that I had overlooked. I'll look into that, thanks a bunch!
    – bronto
    May 8, 2013 at 17:50
  • You probably should have stuck with Fedora. :)
    – Michael Hampton
    May 25, 2013 at 0:31

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I think I found out what the problem was.

The default preferences file looks like this:

Package: *
Pin: release o=linuxmint
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *
Pin: origin packages.linuxmint.com
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: 500

It seems that the pin "release o=linuxmint" never matches. In fact, I changed it with "origin debian.lth.se" (where debian.lth.se is the LMDE mirror I am using), and there: all the priorities work as expected.

So, this seems to be a bug in LMDE. I'll report it as soon as I can.

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