I'm trying to either test a fix that's been proposed or I want to volunteer to test stable release updates before they are pushed out to general users, how can I enable the "proposed" repository?
3 Answers
From the wiki page on the -proposed repository:
To enable the proposed archive for Ubuntu 11.04 go to Applications→Ubuntu Software Center→Edit→Software Sources→Updates and ensure that natty-proposed is ticked.
Those directions map well to recent Ubuntu releases such as 10.10, 10.04, 9.10, etc.
Here are recent pictures from 12.04.

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Using the Command Line
Manual addition
With root permissions edit your /etc/apt/sources.list
:
sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list
Then look for the following line or add it yourself:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-proposed restricted main multiverse universe
(If you are not using precise, you can replace it with your current version)
Save your file. Then run sudo apt-get update
and install the package you want to use sudo apt-get install package/precise-proposed
or sudo apt-get -t precise-proposed install package
.
sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ $(lsb_release -cs)-proposed restricted main multiverse universe' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/proposed-repositories.list"

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You can try UBUNTU SOURCES.LIST AUTOMATIC GENERATOR: includes all of the default repositories that are available through Ubuntu's own GUI, and you can also add other popular/useful PPAs like wine, virtualbox, tor, playdeb and getdeb, mozilla daily builds, medibuntu, etc...

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