Installing own packages with aptitude

["Hans-J. Ullrich" <hans.ullrich@loop.de>]

Hi all, 

I would like to install some selfmade or downloaded packages on my system 
using apt or aptitude. These are packages, which are experimental or 
3rd-party (like my printer driver), and which is no repository for. 

All packages are installable with dpkg -i by hand, and all packages shall 
reside in a special directory (i.e. /var/cache/apt/archive2/ ). 

How must be the syntax in /etc/apt/sources.list ? I suppose, it is something 
like

deb file:///var/cache/apt/archive2/	./

Another question:

Is there a way to install those packages, even it has the wrong architecture ? 
If I do it manually this is working of course, (using 
dpkg -i --force-architecture) , but is there a way to handle it 
automatically ? 

The background is, that the closed-source-driver for my printer (Brother 
MFC210c) is only available as an I386-package, but not as an amd64-package. 
Although, it is working perfectly on amd64-systems !

Best regards

Hans