About Sources

Sources are websites from which your Linux (Mepis) computer can download new software.

Your computer stores a list of websites in its 'sources list'; when you ask the computer to get a new bit of software, it downloads the new software from the website in the list.

You might want to use the same sources list as one of our experienced volunteers, in which case you need to do the following:

1. Press the 'alt' and 'F2' keys at the same time
2. Type 'kdesu kedit /etc/apt/sources.list' into the box that pops up and press return;
3. Enter your "root password" (you should have this written down);
4. You should see a box with lots of lines of text in it. This is the current sources list;
5. Delete all the text and replace it with the text from our sources list page. You can use cut and paste to do this;
6. Edit to your liking. "Uncomment" the sources you want (remove the # sign from the start of the line) and "comment out" the sources you don't want (add a # sign from the start of the line).

That's it! You have your sources.list set up and are ready to start installing software. The sources.list given is suitable for people in the UK. Make sure you remove the MEPIS one if you are NOT using MEPIS.

Check the update pages in the software guide.