Comment 23 for bug 714904

No worries, we all started at some point. :)

Basically synaptics update should have updated the package and in theory it should have worked then. I am not sure though, whether this still all works that well. Problem is that there are a lot of ways to milk a cow. From a graphical end I would use update-manager. There would be a settings button and that allows to enable proposed by clicking a button. From a cli you would add the proposed repo and then you have to run apt-get update at least once to actually pull the information (maybe that could be a missing step with synaptic).

And enabling proposed, yes that will give you _all_ the packages that are in the staging area. There is some way you can pin certain packages, but honestly I found that method too complicated to bother (One doesn't want to enable proposed on a production system for that reason).
Using update-manager you could deselect everything and then select only one package to install. And after that just deactivate proposed again.
Or packages also can be found through launchpad. For example:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ifenslave-2.6 which is ok as long as there are no dependencies to another proposed version.

I probably should be helping on the forums too, but I am not. Time seems to be eaten by all sorts of other things. But there certainly are many helpful people there. Or try irc. #ubuntu-server on freenode could be a good starting point for things like this.