It turned out that ARM decided to make our life easier (sarcasm) by deprecating the use of PPA - their page at launchpad now has an anouncement: "... all new binary and source packages will not be released on Launchpad henceforth ...".
So, to make use of their latest arm-none-eabi-gdb you have to install gcc-arm-embedded manually.
Remove arm-none-eabi-gcc from your system:
sudo apt remove gcc-arm-none-eabi
Download latest version (Linux x86_64 Tarball) from their website, check its MD5. Unpack it into some directory. I used /usr/share/ :
sudo tar xjf gcc-arm-none-eabi-YOUR-VERSION.bz2 -C /usr/share/
Create links so that binaries are accessible system-wide:
sudo ln -s /usr/share/gcc-arm-none-eabi-YOUR-VERSION/bin/arm-none-eabi-gcc /usr/bin/arm-none-eabi-gcc
sudo ln -s /usr/share/gcc-arm-none-eabi-YOUR-VERSION/bin/arm-none-eabi-g++ /usr/bin/arm-none-eabi-g++
sudo ln -s /usr/share/gcc-arm-none-eabi-YOUR-VERSION/bin/arm-none-eabi-gdb /usr/bin/arm-none-eabi-gdb
sudo ln -s /usr/share/gcc-arm-none-eabi-YOUR-VERSION/bin/arm-none-eabi-size /usr/bin/arm-none-eabi-size
sudo ln -s /usr/share/gcc-arm-none-eabi-YOUR-VERSION/bin/arm-none-eabi-objcopy /usr/bin/arm-none-eabi-objcopy
Install dependencies. ARM's "full installation instructions" listed in readme.txt won't tell you what dependencies are - you have to figure it out by trial and error. In my system I had to manually create symbolic links to force it to work:
sudo apt install libncurses-dev
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.6 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.6 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5
Check if it works:
arm-none-eabi-gcc --version
arm-none-eabi-g++ --version
arm-none-eabi-gdb --version
arm-none-eabi-size --version
I've wrapped the script here by @kmhallen into a semi-automated debian package builder here: https://gitlab.com/alelec/arm-none-eabi-gcc-deb/-/releases
Installing a package like this means you can skip the tedious manual symlinks to put tools on the path, and just as importantly you can uninstall / upgrade to newer packages (assuming I remember to make more packages)