I'm setting up a machine which I would like to keep mostly stable (sarge) packages. However, some packages such as Firefox or GAIM, I'd like to run the newer versions. Reading up on the man pages and the Debian manual has gotten me this far:

• /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free

deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free

deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main

• /etc/apt/preferences

Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 650

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 600

• /etc/apt/apt.conf

APT::Default-Release "stable";

aptitude update and then aptitude upgrade work great, updating my local repository and no packages need to be upgraded. From the manuals, my next step should be aptitude -t testing install firefox gaim, however, I'm running into this problem:

laptop:/etc/apt# aptitude -t testing install gaim firefox
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Reading task descriptions... Done
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
E: Unable to correct dependencies, some packages cannot be installed
E: Unable to resolve some dependencies!
Some packages had unmet dependencies.  This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  firefox: Depends: libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.8.0) but 2.6.4-3.1 is installed and it is kept back.
           Depends: libxfixes3 but it is not installable
           Depends: libxinerama1 but it is not installable
  gaim: Depends: libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.8.0) but 2.6.4-3.1 is installed and it is kept back.
        Depends: libxfixes3 but it is not installable
        Depends: libxinerama1 but it is not installable
        Depends: libxss1 but it is not installable

So I then tried a different approach:

laptop:/etc/apt# aptitude -f install gaim=1:1.5.0+1.5.1cvs20051015-4
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Reading task descriptions... Done
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
E: Unable to correct dependencies, some packages cannot be installed
E: Unable to resolve some dependencies!
Some packages had unmet dependencies.  This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  gaim: Depends: gaim-data (= 1:1.5.0+1.5.1cvs20051015-4) but it is not installable
        Depends: libatk1.0-0 (>= 1.9.0) but 1.8.0-4 is installed.
        Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.6-6) but 2.3.2.ds1-22sarge3 is installed.
        Depends: libcairo2 (>= 1.0.2-2) but it is not installable
        Depends: libgcrypt11 (>= 1.2.2) but 1.2.0-11.1 is installed.
        Depends: libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.10.0) but 2.6.4-1 is installed.
        Depends: libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.8.0) but 2.6.4-3.1 is installed.
        Depends: libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.12.1) but 1.8.1-1 is installed.
        Depends: libxfixes3 but it is not installable
        Depends: libxinerama1 but it is not installable
        Depends: libxss1 but it is not installable

Where am I going wrong here?

I've been trying to figure out an easy way to do something along these lines:

• incoming requests for xyz.com on port 80 redirects/communicates with localhost port 6789
• incoming requests for abc.com on port 80 redirects/communicates with localhost port 9876
• etc. etc.

Squid seems to be overkill, and not easily understood (by me), and I'm not sure if this is feasible to do with just iptables. Searching through the packages I can't seem to find anything that will do the job. I don't want caching, just communication redirects to the right port.

I'm sure there is an easy solution to this, and yet I'm completely missing it somehow. How would you go about this?

This topic with other methods has been covered previously here. However, it was considered as more of a "hack".

Here is a method that is currently supported by Debian itself, edit the /etc/init.d/rc:root:~# nano /etc/init.d/rc

Scroll down a page or so and you'll see a segment of script similar to this:

# Specify method used to enable concurrent init.d scripts. Valid
# options are 'none', 'shell' and 'startpar'
CONCURRENCY=none


Examining the script further down tells me that startpar is not fully supported, so I went with shell. A restart shows me that sure enough, the init.d scripts are being run concurrently. This did make quite a difference in my boottime, knocking nearly 20 seconds off. Of course, any disk read/write bottlenecks can still happen.

Enjoy.