Missing apt repo's? (git, firefox, etc)

Software PureOS
1

I just received my Librem 13. It looks and feels awesome, but so far I’m a but frustrated with apt. I want to install a couple basic things, such as Firefox, Chromium, git, apache2, etc. So I tried the following things

sudo apt install firefox
sudo apt install chromium-browser
sudo apt install git
sudo apt install apache2

Unfortunately it says (in Dutch) that it can’t find the packages, probably because those repositores aren’t added.

This confused me quite a lot. I thought that PureOS is based on Debian and that it is therefore perfect to use for development purposes, but that appears not to be the case.

Is there any way that I can easily add the standard set of Debian repo’s? All tips are welcome!

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Have you run these exact commands?
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt full-upgrade

I don’t remember having issues installing git.

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Ok, in the end I found out that in “Software & Updates” there was no download source selected under “Downloadable from the internet”. I simply selected “Officially supported (main)” and than “sudo apt upgrade” actually did something.

I can now install git and apache2. But it still can’t find firefox or chromium-browser.

Any other ideas?

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Not sure how correct is doing this, but it should work.
You can try and add Debian 9’s main repositories (including contrib and non-free packages).

To do this, open this file
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

and add these lines at the bottom:

deb  http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch main contrib non-free
deb-src  http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch main contrib non-free

deb  http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src  http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch-updates main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ stretch/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ stretch/updates main contrib non-free

save the file, then sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade then do a reboot and only then try installing the software you want.

Again not sure if this is a “best practice” or anything, but to my understanding it shouldn’t harm either, since these are Debian’s official repositories. Please let me know if that helps.

edit: Perhaps there’s another way I can think of. I’d assume in that file (/etc/apt/sources.list) by default you have the two repositories you see in “Software & Updates” but without contrib and non-free. So you could first try and add contrib and non-free to those two, then follow these steps:

  • sudo apt update
  • sudo apt upgrade
  • do a reboot

and if this doesn’t help then you could do the Debian thing I wrote first.

p.s. I’d gladly check first and then give you exact advice, but unfortunately right now I don’t have access to my computer running PureOS.

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Firefox and Chrome are not in the repo due to some security/licensing compatibility issues. However, you can download PureBrowser/Iceweasel which is based on Firefox and Chromium which is an open-source version of Chrome. For more info,

apt search iceweasel
apt search chromium

I set up Firefox/Chrome on my librem without any issues and posted it on this thread.

Installing chrome automatically setup the binary repo source, while firefox downloads and installs update when there are any.

I also documented my experience setting up a LAMP stack on my librem which you might find useful for setting up your apache server.

I wrote a lengthy thread on setting up a Librem which you may find useful.

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