Installing Ubuntu Packages from a Specific Repository

In this article, I’ll show you how to install Ubuntu packages from a specific repository. It’s not that this is a terribly difficult process, but it also isn’t necessarily intuitive for those who haven’t had to do it before. I ran into this while trying to install an alpha release of LXC 1.0.0 for my recent post on automatically connecting LXC to Open vSwitch (OVS).

Normally, you’d install a package using apt-get like this:

apt-get install package-name

However, when you want to install a package from a specific repository, the command syntax shifts slightly so that it looks like this instead:

apt-get install package-name/repository

So, in my particular case, I was trying to install LXC. However, I needed the alpha LXC 1.0.0 package from the precise-backports repository. So the command to do that looked like this:

apt-get install lxc/precise-backports

Are there other useful apt-get tidbits like this that other readers might find particularly useful? Feel free to share in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

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