MNT Reform apt repository

Table of Contents

Introduction

In contrast to the apt repository provided by MNT Research, this repository provides its content based on Debian stable (Trixie) instead of unstable for a more reliable computing experience. The packages in this repository are signed with a PGP key that is part of the Debian Developer keyring shipped by the debian-keyring package on your system and thus there exists a trust path from your existing installation to this repository. For more guidance regarding OpenPGP verification, see the instructions about PGP.

Adding the reform.debian.net repository for Debian Trixie to your existing MNT Debian unstable installation is of limited use after the release of Trixie. This is because if you upgraded packages to versions from unstable after the Trixie release, you cannot go back to convert your installation to Debian Trixie. Debian does not support package downgrades.

Step 1: Adjust apt sources

You can choose between three different ways to enable the reform.debian.net mirror:

Method A: Using extrepo

Install the package extrepo and then run:

extrepo enable reform.debian.net

This will create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/extrepo_reform.debian.net.sources with the correct contents automatically using OpenPGP signed repository descriptions from the central extrepo mirror. If you rather trust the locally installed extrepo-data package you can also run:

extrepo enable --offlinedata reform.debian.net

Method B: Manually downloading deb822 sources file

You can also manually download reform_trixie.sources and place it in /etc/apt/sources.list.d like this:

sudo env --chdir=/etc/apt/sources.list.d wget https://reform.debian.net/reform_trixie.sources

If you go this route instead of using extrepo, see this page for a method to verify that the OpenPGP key attached to your downloaded reform_trixie.sources is indeed the one that is also present in your /usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg.

Method C: Manually adding one-line entry

If you prefer to use the one-line format of /etc/apt/sources.list instead of the deb822 format of reform_trixie.sources, you have to download the key to a custom location (for example to /etc/apt/keyrings/reform.debian.net.asc) and add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb [arch=arm64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/reform.debian.net.asc] https://reform.debian.net/debian trixie main

See this page for a method to extract the right key from /usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg and store it in /etc/apt/keyrings/reform.debian.net.asc or another location of your choosing and referenced by the signed-by option in your one-line apt sources entry.

Step 2: Adjust apt preferences

The original MNT Reform system image contains a preference file which prioritizes packages from the mntre.com repository over packages coming from elsewhere. You need to do the same with the reform.debian.net repository. Without setting up this pinning, you run the risk of accidentally upgrading to package versions from debian.org for those packages patched by reform.debian.net in the small time window before reform.debian.net managed to rebuild new package versions with the reform-specfic patches on top. To this end, comment out or remove the existing content of /etc/apt/preferences.d/reform.pref and add this:

Package: *
Pin: origin "reform.debian.net"
Pin-Priority: 999

Step 3: Upgrading

You can now synchronize the package index files from their sources by running:

sudo apt update

You can verify that your apt sources are set up correctly by ensuring that the output of the following command does include https://reform.debian.net/debian and does NOT include https://mntre.com/reform-debian-repo:

apt-get indextargets --format '$(SITE)' 'Created-By: Packages' | sort -u

You can verify that apt pinning via apt preferences worked as expected by verifying the apt pin value of linux-image-arm64 was indeed set to 999 and comes from reform.debian.net:

apt-cache policy linux-image-arm64 | grep "999 https://reform.debian.net"

If everything checks out, you can run these commands to finish the conversion:

sudo apt upgrade --without-new-pkgs
sudo apt full-upgrade

Backports

The Linux kernel from trixie-backports is provided for support for more features (automatic screen rotation on pocket reform) and more platforms (classic Reform with DSI display). To enable the backports repository, follow method B or C from above but replace trixie with trixie-backports. For example for method B, do:

sudo env --chdir=/etc/apt/sources.list.d wget https://reform.debian.net/reform_trixie-backports.sources

Or, for method C, add the following to your sources.list:

deb [arch=arm64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/reform.debian.net.asc] https://reform.debian.net/debian trixie-backports main

And then install the correct kernel and reform-tools package using:

sudo apt install linux-image-mnt-reform-arm64/trixie-backports reform-tools/trixie-backports

Source

The packages are generated by the following script: https://salsa.debian.org/reform-team/reform-debian-packages