[conspire] Mixing Squeeze / Wheezy

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> A while back, I installed Wheezy in place of Squeeze on older
> laptop.  A primary motivation was getting new versions of assorted
> packages, such as GNUCash.  It also lead to learning lots about
> desktop environments: Gnome, KDE, LXDE which were topics of assorted
> email threads.  
> 
> Now with things reasonably "stable" using the "testing" release, I
> noticed a message that was previously ignored.  It advised going to
> linux wireless and downloading a particular driver so that WiFi would
> work.  And after following several steps of re-direction, I
> determined that what I should do was:
> 
> aptitude install <driver_installer>  
> It didn't work. 
> 
> aptitude search <driver_installer> 
> Didn't find the package.
> 
> Well the Debian package lists includes the desired package in stable not in testing.
> 
> I am vaguely aware that there exists a way modify
> /etc/apt/sources.list to include both, but I can't seem to find the
> details so that the package manager won't get confused.  

You _can_ include both the stable and testing branches in
/etc/apt/sources.list or /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ -- but that is in
general a bad thing to do.

The gap between versions of packages in the stable vs. testing branches
is just too wide, such that mixing the two apt sources can create serious
problems in your system.  (The same is not true of testing vs. unstable,
as those are quite close.)  I would even say that attempting to mix
stable and testing/unstable is way up in the top 10 ways to mess up a
Debian system.

So, what I'm basically saying is, wrong solution.  You should probably
stop and consider the larger question of _why_ your fetch of a desired
package didn't work.  It's difficult to help you with the specifics
because you didn't name the package.

You might want to look in http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/ 
for a specific package version and just fetch it and do 'dpkg -i name'.
However, again getting back to the key question of why, what happened to
the package?  Is the driver no longer maintained?  Is it perhaps now in
a differently named package?  Is it perhaps obsolete because there's a
better replacement driver?

I'm a bit curious about the notion of a separate 'particular driver' in
a package outside the kernel package.  That seems odd.  I normally
expect all network drivers to be furnished as part of the kernel
package.  In the rare event of (perceive) need to use an out-of-tree
driver, you as user either must patch kernel source and compile a custom
kernel _or_ will be attempting to use someone's precompiled driver
binary object that may work with only a narrow range of kernel versions.

Also, I'm very unclear on what 'going to Linux wireless and downloading
a particular driver' means.  What does 'going to Linux wireless' mean?

As an aside, sometimes users speak of getting wireless 'drivers' in
confusion when the intended reference is to a necessary firmware image
('BLOB' = binary large object).  Firmware images are not drivers; they 
are files of binary code that gets bulk-loaded into the RAM space used
by a driver in order to initialise the hardware.

I hope that helps.  If not, I can probably be more of use if you are a
bit more specific.