Atlantic Linux Blog

Package repositories for old Ubuntu releases

While you shouldn’t run old, unsupported releases of any Linux distribution (and Ubuntu is no exception to this), if you have to for some good reason (like you have some server running some proprietary system which you haven’t gotten working on a current release yet, and you have put adequate security measures around this system) then may find http://old-releases.ubuntu.com useful.

To continue installing packages on your unsupported release of Ubuntu,

1. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list
2. Replace all occurrences of archive.ubuntu.com with old-releases.ubuntu.com
3. aptitude update
4. aptitude install <package name>

It is very much a band-aid, and shouldn’t be used to run old unsupported releases indefinitely (for the simple reason that you most likely have various unpatched security holes in that old release).

If you don’t like upgrading your distribution every few months, you should really be using an LTS release of Ubuntu (currently 8.04 with the next LTS expected to be 10.04 next year).

Tags: aptitude, linux, packages, ubuntu 7.10, ubuntu 8.04