snapshot.debian.net/archive is one of the unofficial debian projects that can be very useful if you are looking for old debian packages that have been removed from the official repositories. This post is a short presentation of debian snapshot project and how it can help you find the debian packages you can’t seem to find anywhere else.

Debian contains a huge collection of software packages and in order to keep up with this huge size a debian repository is designed to keep only ONE version of a package. This means that newer versions will remove the old ones from the repository, to keep it clean and as slim as possible. Normally this is not a problem as debian (at least for stable and testing) is known to be quite stable in the package updates and things in general don’t break. Still it can happen that a software package is removed, its functionality changed in a newer version or you just want to install the same packages on more machines.

By default each debian system will keep a local cache of all the packages it downloads and installs. This can be found under /var/cache/apt/archives and if the package you are looking for is there you should just go ahead and use it as it is the fastest way to get it. Still if you regularly clean your cache (apt-get clean) then you will no longer find the packages there either.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you are looking for an integrated, java virtual machine, compiler and runtime environment, then Debian does provide them, and there are quite a lot of projects you can choose from, that are included in Debian:

• kaffe: http://www.kaffe.org
• gcj/libgcj: http://sourceware.cygnus.com/java/
• jikes: http://www.research.ibm.com/jikes/
• kopi: http://www.dms.at/kjc/
• FastJar http://fastjar.sourceforge.net/ ,etc.

but you will not find Sun’s Java 2 SE (JDK/JRE) included in Debian because of its restrictive license policy.

Read the rest of this entry »