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Firefox 3.6 and Thunderbird 3.0 on Karmic

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I regularly use Thunderbird 3.0 betas on my Karmic via the Ubuntu Daily Mozilla PPA. Unfortunately the PPA also contains snapshot builds of Firefox 3.5 and XulRunner 1.9.1, which I want to keep at their standard Ubuntu versions. To make apt-get upgradeing as painless as possible I am using package pinning to stop unwanted packages from other repositories to override the defaults.

I have added this to my /etc/apt/preferences file:
Package: *
Pin: release o=Ubuntu,a=karmic
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: firefox-3.5
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-ubuntu-mozilla-daily,a=karmic
Pin-Priority: -10

Package: firefox-3.5-branding
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-ubuntu-mozilla-daily,a=karmic
Pin-Priority: -10

Package: firefox-3.5-gnome-support
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-ubuntu-mozilla-daily,a=karmic
Pin-Priority: -10

Package: firefox
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-ubuntu-mozilla-daily,a=karmic
Pin-Priority: -10

Package: firefox-gnome-support
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-ubuntu-mozilla-daily,a=karmic
Pin-Priority: -10

Package: xulrunner-1.9.1
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-ubuntu-mozilla-daily,a=karmic
Pin-Priority: -10

Package: xulrunner-1.9.1-gnome-support
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-ubuntu-mozilla-daily,a=karmic
Pin-Priority: -10

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3 thoughts on “Firefox 3.6 and Thunderbird 3.0 on Karmic”

  1. Hi Tristan,

    I don’t know if you realized the first few lines in your attached file effectively disables Ubuntu security updates.

    Package: *
    Pin: release o=Ubuntu,a=karmic
    Pin-Priority: 900

    I removed these lines (leaving my /etc/apt/preferences file empty and created a new file /etc/apt/preferences.d/ubuntu-mozilla-daily-pin-400 with the following contents (to set the Mozilla daily repo to a lower priority). This works as long as the main Ubuntu repos don’t have the s/w I use from the daily repo (like thunderbird-3.0)

    Package: *
    Pin: release o=LP-PPA-ubuntu-mozilla-daily
    Pin-Priority: 400

  3. One question, please…

    I’ve noticed that you create an entry for each package you want to prevent upgrading. I use several repositories and I need package pinning sometimes. I tried using wilcards such as firefox* but that did not work. Do you know if there is a way to use wildcards here?

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