HOWTO: Add Debian Repositories to Xandros.

During my recent foray with Xandros Linux, I identified two things that I had to do to make Xandros usable. The first was to get suspend working, which is covered here, and the second was to gain access to more applications. The Xandros Networks (XN) is sadly bereft of applications.

One of the saving graces of Xandros is that Debian Sarge repositories seem to work with it. I installed a handful of programs from the normal Sarge repositories and other than some minor menu madness that was easy to sort out, they installed perfectly.

Being a Debian-based distro, Xandros uses apt-get. I’ve already written about apt-get’s config file, sources.list, so I won’t rehash that here. Rather, I’ll just list the repositories that I added to my sources.list file.

I added the following lines to my Xandros /etc/sources.list file:

# Standard Debian package sources
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free
deb-src http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free

There’s also a post on the Xandros forums about some repositories supplied by ArchLUG, but I haven’t tried them so I don’t know what’s in them. Here’s a link to those repositories.

A word of caution. I didn’t try an apt-get dist-upgrade and to be honest, I don’t think that’s a good idea. It’s one thing to grab specific applications, but quite another to upgrade the entire system.