Sometimes, especially if you have switched from some another GNU/Linux distribution to Debian GNU/Linux, your will have one major problem: you are missing some software available in your previous distribution. That is were Debian unofficial repositories can help you.

In this post I want to describe the most popular unofficial repositories with set of useful packages for my favorite Linux distribution - Debian .

In my experience with Debian, I have used many different unofficial repositories, but following repos are the best (list is not ordered):

Hint: To use any of described repositories, you need to do a few simple steps:

  1. Find closest mirror of the selected repo.
  2. Add repo declaration to your /etc/apt/sources.list file (using appropriate mirror address, mirror directory, your debian version and set of repository parts: main, contrib, non-free, etc):
    deb http://your.repo.mirr.or/repo/path sarge main contrib non-free
  3. Update packages list:
    # apt-get update

If you are using Debian Stable and you see, that versions some of systems packages is too old for you, you can use backports.org site. Backports are recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates), so they will run without new libraries (wherever it is possible) on a stable Debian distribution.

If you can not find needed package in repositories described above, you can use great tool - third-party packages searching system: apt-get.org. Almost all unofficial repositories are listed there and you can find specific package by its name or platform.

And the last thing, if you know some another useful unofficial repository, you can share your knowledge with me and my readers by posting some comments to this post. :-)

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