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I'm using Ubuntu Lucid. Due to some reasons, I'm not allowed to upgrade the OS.

I need to use the latest version of a software, with version number > 2.5.x. However, when I check the software repo for Ubuntu Lucid, I found that the latest version of that software is 2.2.26. That version does not have the functions that I need.

I found that the software repo for Ubuntu Natty provide the same software with version > 2.6.x. I would like to use this version.

Can I edit the source.list file and point it to the Natty repo? Is it ok to install Natty packages in Lucid?

Thanks.

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  • You might want to troubleshoot why you can't upgrade the OS first.
    – Bart Silverstrim
    Sep 10, 2011 at 11:54

2 Answers 2

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You can use APT pinning for that purpose, see PinningHowto. But you should be very cautious because you can render your system unusable with this.

Additionally there are other problems, like dependencies of the packages which you want to install from another repository.

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The answer is going to be "maybe". You can certainly grab the .deb file for the package from the repo, and run "dpkg -i packagefile.deb" to install it from the deb file, without reference to the repo. That would probably be better than mucking with the sources.list.

The problem is that the package may have dependencies (to and from) that you may not want to get into, if you aren't upgrading the base version of the operating system. For example, redis from Natty may work fine because it doesn't depend on anything in particular (and nothing depends on it), but something else may specify a particular version of glibc, etc., and upgrading glibc is going to break everything else on your box. It's hard to say without knowing the specifics of the package you're looking at.

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