Josh Sherman
I’m happy to admit that I’m a bit of a Debian novice. Coming from a decade of using Ubuntu, I still have a bit to learn.
My recent dilemma was with the version of tmux I had on one of my servers. Nothing wrong with tmux 1.9 but it was throwing some errors with my more up to date tmux config. Specifically with the mouse options that didn’t exist prior to the 2.x versions.
Fortunately, Debian has something called “backports”. Backports are packages that are pulled from the testing branch and made available in Debian stable.
Backports may not be as thoroughly tested as the packages in the stable branch, but at least you gain access to some newer packages.
To install a newer version of tmux on Debian 8 without needing to compile from source, you would issue the following command:
sudo apt-get -t jessie-backports install tmux
That’s all!
If you already have tmux installed, it will upgrade to the latest version (at the time of the this writing is version 2.3). If you don’t have tmux installed, it would installed the latest version instead of the more dated version available by default.
Even though Debian stable is considered a bit more dated than other distros, you still have options to be able to run the latest / greatest version of certain software packages.
OH! and Happy Easter :)
