Ubuntu – Ubuntu 16.04 apt-get doesn’t provide conky-all from Ubuntu 14.04

14.0416.04conkydowngradepackage-management

When upgrading from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 my Conky scripts were automatically converted from Conky 1.9 format to new Conky 1.10 format but they were broken and won't run under Conky 1.10. So I downgraded Conky from 1.10 to 1.9 which Ubuntu 14.04 uses.

However I only downgraded conky-std and not conky-all. Now I want to get nvidia-settings GPU Mhz, Memory Mhz, Memory usage and Temperature statistics in Conky and the easiest method is with conky-all: askubuntu…nvidia-plugin-for-conky

When I try to install older 14.04 version with:

sudo apt-get install conky-all=1.9.0-4

as instructed in: askubuntu…how-to-downgrade-a-package-via-apt-get, I get the bad news:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Version '1.9.0-4' for 'conky-all' was not found

This didn't happen a few weeks ago when I purged conky-all 1.10.1-3 and installed conky-std 1.9.0-4 and froze it.

On the page: ubuntu.com/trusty/conky-all under Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) the conky-all 1.9.0-4 version exists and relevant documentation is all there so it's not as if support for Trusty package is gone.

apt-cache policy conky-all reveals:

conky-all:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 1.10.1-3
  Version table:
     1.10.1-3 500
        500 http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages

apt-cache policy conky-std reveals:

conky-std:
  Installed: 1.9.0-4
  Candidate: 1.10.1-3
  Version table:
     1.10.1-3 500
        500 http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages
 *** 1.9.0-4 100
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
  1. Should I manually go about installing it outside of apt-get?
  2. Should I link to a different PPA and apt-get that way?
  3. Are the Ubuntu packages temporarily broken and only showing conky-all version 1.10 today and will be fixed tomorrow? (yeah wishful thinking of a procrastinator).

Thanks to any conky experts that may be watching out there!

Best Answer

Looks like it is fairly straightforward to use the older version under Xenial and a big 'thanks' to Cory Goldberg for this information. I have modified Cory's method in quite a few places:

  1. Remove any existing version of conky:

    sudo apt-get remove --purge conky-std conky-all

  2. Download the older version of the conky-all package:

    wget http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/c/conky/conky-all_1.9.0-6build1_amd64.deb

  3. Install with gdebi:

    sudo apt-get install gdebi
sudo gdebi conky-all_1.9.0-6build1_amd64.deb

  4. Lock or pin your older version to prevent the Repository installing the newer version next time you update:

    sudo apt-mark hold conky-all

And then enjoy your older version of conky :)

Below is a screenshot of the 'pinned' older version of Conky on Xenial, seen in my old friend Synaptic, the exclamation mark signifying that the package is 'pinned':

enter image description here

References:

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