Debian Lenny: Installing software after End of Life

Debian Lenny had its End of Life in Feb 2012, but many people are still running this OS version (Debian 5).  How do you get additional packages installed etc after Debian is no longer supporting the OS?

Enter Snapshot.Debian.org, which allows you to add a repo designed to correspond to a date and time. Lenny went EOL in 2012 Feb 6th, so that seems like a good date to get the most recent packages available.

You can also browse Debian Snapshots and find a specific date that a package version was available, and set up your sources.list file to pull other packages from that same date as well.  This is maybe the coolest thing in Debian system administration, I gotta tell ya :)

As root, edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file and add these lines, which correspond to the last minute of 2012 Feb 6th.

## Snapshot.Debian.org

deb     http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20120206T235900Z/ lenny main
deb-src http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20120206T235900Z/ lenny main
deb     http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-security/20120206T235900Z/ lenny/updates main
deb-src http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-security/20120206T235900Z/ lenny/updates main

Now you can get any missed updates or additional packages for your older Debian installation.  Thanks so much to Debian for making this happen!