Debian

Some Debian tips and tricks.

Check for obsolete packages

Obsolete packages are those which cannot be installed from any of the configured repositories.

aptitude search ?obsolete

I have no idea if this can be accomplished with plain apt-get.

Override DNS resolvers received over DHCP

If you want to override the DNS resolvers received over DHCP, add the following to /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf

interface "eth0" {
    supersede domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4;
}

Adjust accordingly.

Install all build dependencies for a source package

Sometimes you can’t use apt-get build-dep (the first time you are building the package for example). We are going to use mk-build-deps from the devscripts package (equivs also needs to be installed.

mk-build-deps -ir -t "apt-get -qq -y --no-install-recommends"

Put a package on hold

Putting a package on hold:

sudo apt-mark hold package

Putting a package out of hold:

sudo apt-mark unhold package