### Where can I find repositories for Debian Lenny (5.0)? ###


I have a bunch of servers running around. Some of them are stil running on Debian 5.0 (Lenny). The other day I ran into a big problem: need to install a new piece of software on one of such oldish servers, but apt-get failed immediately, with a long list of 404 errors.

It appears that Lenny is 'obsolete' now, and as such Debian removed their update repositories. Not cool. Of course, I could install my software in the good old way, that is: geting sources from a svn, fighting a little moment with libraries not being in right versions, gcc flags having evolved since the program has been written, etc... to finally get a binary suitable for my system. But this doesn't sounds right when I know that few months ago this software was available as a ready-to-go package for my OS!

Fortunately, After a little bit of searching on the net, I found my solution: In fact, Debian did *not* removed their Lenny repositories, but *moved* them. I don't really understand why they did that, but still - it's a fact. Therefore the only thing I had to do, is configure apt to use the repositories from their new URLs.

Open your sources.list file located at /etc/apt/sources.list, and replace the contents of the file with the code below:

 deb http://archive.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free contrib
 deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free contrib
 # Volatile:
 deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free
 deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free
 # Backports:
 deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-backports lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Done. apt-get came back to life! (until next time Debian folks move their repos around)