Debian – Package firefox is not available

debianfirefox

I read this article on the basics of pinning. I have a question, I installed debian 8 jessie. There are a few things that I am having trouble with.

I would like to install a few packages, like firefox. When I run apt-get install firefox I get this error: 

 apt-get install firefox
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package firefox is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'firefox' has no installation candidate

How can I find out which repositories to add to get the packages that I want?

I would like to keep the core stable repo but things like firefox and other apps I can pull from more bleeding edge repos.

How can I do this?

Best Answer

In Debian, firefox is called iceweasel and has a different icon. I believe that they are functionally equivalent except for the icon. Similarly Thunderbird is called icedove in Debian.

Debian has most packages. If you want to have access to all Debian repos, you should check your /etc/apt/sources.list{,.d/*} and make sure the lines that start with deb end with main contrib non-free.

There's also official Debian backports (or have been in the past) where later package versions are backported and build for older Debian releases.

Beyond that, there's web searching!

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