I recently updated my work machine from Mint 8 to Ubuntu Lucid and noticed in the process that Lucid comes with the very latest Bacula version, namely 5.0.1. Sadly, this client is incompatible with what we run at work, so I had to figure out a way to “hold” the packages at their karmic versions which still worked fine on lucid. Thanks to the excellent Ubuntu docs, I managed to put those packages “on hold” using the following commands:

echo bacula-fd  hold | dpkg --set-selections

echo bacula-common  hold | dpkg --set-selections

Once you run apt-get update, you’ll see the newer versions being held back.