How To Get LTS updates for Debian 6 (Squeeze)

Debian Squeeze (6.0) is the so named "Old Stable" branch of Debian, the official support for this version ended in April 2014. Squeeze is still used on many servers, so a group of Debian developers decided to provide security patches for a longer timespan for this release. These so called LTS updates (LTS = Long Term Support) are not available on the normal Debian update repository and not every user might be aware that he won't get these updates automatically. The following short guide explains how to enable the LTS repository and install the updates.

 

Add the new Debian LTS repository

Open the sources.list file with an editor:

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

and add the following 2 lines at the end of the /etc/apt/sources.list file:

 

deb http://ftp.uni-kl.de/debian squeeze-lts main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uni-kl.de/debian/ squeeze-lts main contrib non-free

 

Please note: The updates are only provided for the i386 and amd64 architectures.

 

Installation of Debian updates

The updates are then installed as usual with apt. Run these commands to update the packagelist and install the updates:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

 

Limitations

Not all packages will get security updates. To run a check if unsupported packages are installed on your Server, install the new package "debian-security-support".

apt-get install debian-security-support

A check if unsupprted packages are installed is run every time a package gets installed. You can run the test manually with:

check-support-status

 

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By: Jacek

It is important to add information, that security updates squeeze-lts are planed only until February 2016!

By: bob

Failed to fetch http://ftp.uni-kl.de/debian/dists/squeeze-lts/Release  Unable to find expected entry  main/binary-i386/Packages in Met

c1-01%                                                                                                                                ?a-index file (malformed Release file?)

 

By: till

Squeeze is end of life, so you can't get updates for it anymore. If you want to install a package on squeeze from now on, use the Debian archive servers. But I highly recommend to update the server to Debian Wheezy or Jessie instead.