Installation Questions for a Debian Newbie

["John T. Croteau" <jt@comsol.org>]

Hello All!

I am making the switch to Debian after using Slackware for quite sometime 
and SLS before that.  I am a seasoned Linux user, started out with one of 
the first SLS distributions which included the .99pl9 kernel!  I am, 
however, new to Debian.

As I type this, FTP is hard at work downloading everything.  I could nit 
find any type of installation readme and therefore have one question.

Is it ok to rename all of the packages to an 8.3 format for installation 
from a DOS partition?  I currently have all the packages stored on my 
existing Slackware partition.  I usually do all my software installs from 
a spare IDE hard drive and would like to put debian on there too.

Thanks!