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IGWN Debian Repositories

IGWN Software support for Debian is provided by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics at Potsdam-Golm via a (signed) repository.

Configuring apt

Debian users can configure the IGWN Debian Repositories as an extra package source.

You might need to install ca-certificates and apt-transport-https before

In order to accept the certificate offered by hypatia.aei.mpg.de you may need to install the ca-certificates package. Also, since hypatia insists on using https, the apt-transport-https package has to be installed:

apt-get install ca-certificates
apt-get install apt-transport-https

First download the signing key and verify its signature. The download is simply done with:

wget https://hypatia.aei.mpg.de/debian/keys/hypatia-key.asc

and the verification can be performed with the following command:

gpg --show-keys --with-colons hypatia-key.asc | \
    awk -F: '$1=="pub",($1!="pub"&&$2=="-"){if($1=="fpr"){print$10} else if($1=="uid"){print$10}}'

You should see exactly this:

2ECF71FB64FEA6AFEF3E412E914A65135414C35B
Steffen Grunewald (Hypatia/LVK Debian Repository signing key) <steffen.grunewald@ligo.org>

Once the key has been verified successfully, you can move it to the default location for your system (requires sudo):

sudo mv hypatia-key.asc /etc/apt/keyrings/

The final step is to now instruct the packaging system of the package repository, which can be done in a single command:

bash -c 'cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/lscdebian.list' << EOF
deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/hypatia-key.asc] https://hypatia.aei.mpg.de/debian/  $(. /etc/os-release; echo $VERSION_CODENAME) lvk
EOF

Not every architecture and distribution combination is supported

Not all combinations are available, and some packages may be unavailable due to unaddressed build failures!

While the amd64 and arm64 architectures are maintained as much as possible (modulo reported but unfixed bugs), riscv64 and ppc64el are considered experimental and are available for trixie only.

Also, newer versions of Debian may be supported before this page is updated. You can find out the codename of each Debian distribution on the Debian Releases website; if your favoured codename isn't listed above, try it anyway and it might work. If it doesn't work (the URL returns '404 Not Found') it's probably too new and not yet supported by the AEI-Potsdam-Golm group, or too old and support has been removed.

Deprecated configuration

The following command was used in

deb [trusted=yes] https://hypatia.aei.mpg.de/lsc-{arch}-{dist} ./

where {arch} can be one of

  • amd64,
  • arm64,
  • i386,
  • powerpc,
  • ppc64el,

and {dist} one of

  • bullseye,
  • bookworm or
  • trixie.

As of December 2025, bullseye as oldoldstable is being phased out.

The solution however poses security risks and requires an explicit mention of the architecture.

Once this is configured, run (this may require sudo like the previous steps):

apt-get update

to make the new package source available to APT. (Check for errors and fix them before proceeding.)

To check that this configuration works, you should be able to search for IGWN-internal packages, e.g. lal:

Verify Debian configuration

# apt-cache policy lal
lal:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 7.7.0-1.1+deb12u0
  Version table:
     7.7.0-1.1+deb12u0 500
        500 https://hypatia.aei.mpg.de/debian bookworm/lvk amd64 Packages

Contributing software

To contribute software to the IGWN Debian Repositories:

  1. Upload a source distribution to a supported archive

  2. Open an IGWN Software Change Request ensuring that one or more of t Debian XX (Codename) distribution checkboxes are filled.

Support

If you run into problems, please contact lscdebian@aei.mpg.de.