Petter Reinholdtsen

How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze
25th December 2012

Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new year! I hope next year will prove to be a good year.

Bitcoin, the digital decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting experiment. And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in Debian is about to improve a bit. The new debian source package (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting in the NEW queue for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package name.

And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze using the following steps to get a set of working packages:

git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
cd bitcoin
DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new

You might have to install some build dependencies as well. The list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment. Note that the client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment. Make sure your ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download all the blocks. The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will not be able to get all the features out of the client.

As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: bitcoin, debian, english.

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