Back to main page ...Debian ships with Regina “out of the box”. However, the version of Regina that ships with each Debian release is fixed (e.g., Debian 10.x ships with Regina 5.1, and Debian 11.x ships with Regina 6.0.1).
If you wish to keep up-to-date with the newest version of Regina, follow these instructions.
The instructions differ according to whether you are running the bleeding-edge Debian unstable, or a formal Debian stable release.
These instructions only install the main packages regina-normal and regina-normal-doc, which is all that most people will need. If you are a C++ programmer and you wish to build Regina into your own projects, you should also install the package regina-normal-dev.
If you run Sid (the Debian unstable release), you can install Regina from the usual Debian servers like any other package:
example$ apt-get install regina-normal
Sid always ships with the latest version of Regina (though it may take a day or two for new versions to appear on your Debian mirror).
To keep up-to-date with Regina, you will need to add Regina's repository to your list of software sources. These instructions will show you how.
You only need to do this once! Once you have done this, Debian will happily manage installation and upgrades of Regina just like it does for any other package.
Open a terminal and grant yourself root privileges.
Install the debian-keyring package. This will give you Regina's cryptographic signing key (since Ben is a Debian developer). To do this, type:
apt-get install debian-keyring
Download Regina's repository description, according to your version of Debian:
Debian 12.x (bookworm): regina-bookworm.sources
Debian 11.x (bullseye): regina-bullseye.sources
Copy the file you just downloaded into Debian's sources directory /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, as shown below (replacing ~/Downloads/regina-VERSION.sources with the location of the file you downloaded):
cp -i ~/Downloads/regina-VERSION.sources /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
Note the suffix .d on the directory name! You do not want to overwrite sources.list.
Update the list of available packages. To do this, type:
apt-get update
If you see an error like “the method driver /usr/lib/apt/methods/https could not be found”, install the package apt-transport-https and try again.
If you see an error like “the public key is not available”, it may be because you forgot to install debian-keyring in the first step.
Install or upgrade Regina like you would any other package. Type:
apt-get install regina-normal
If you had previously added Regina's repository as a single line in /etc/apt/sources.list, you can comment that line out now (or just delete it). The new file that you just downloaded encodes the same repository but with better security. (The old apt-line will still work, so there is no urgency to change.)