How to use old Debian repository for unmaintained Debian versions

Software version
Operating System	Debian X
Website	Debian Website
Last Update	05/07/2013
Others

1 Introduction

Installing old Debian to prepare a migration is quite good when repositories are still available. But for old unmaintained versions of Debian, we need to change some things.

This is what we're gonna look here.

2 Usage

For this example, we're going to take lenny version which is totally deprecated. To make repository work, we need to change the repository url by 'archives' :

/etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free contrib deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free contrib # Volatile: deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free # Backports: deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-backports lenny-backports main contrib non-free # Previously announced security updates: deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-security lenny/updates main

That's all, you can update.

Notes

It works with all Debian versions

3 References

http://superuser.com/questions/404806/did-debian-lenny-repositories-vanish