Installed from floppies, now what?

["Michael J. Cotherman" <mjcother@ij.net>]

Maybe I am missing the obvious, but would someone please tell me 
where to find instructions on installing packages?

I see dpkg and dselect mentioned, but when I use these commands, 
I feel that I am lost....

I do not have a distribution cd, nor do I want to purchase another 
set of disks that wil be outdated in a year....

I have downloaded some packages, do I keep them in a directory
system similar to what is on the ftp server, or do I put them all
in one directory?

When I start dselect, it asks me where certain things are , and 
I actually have very little idea what they are referring to..

Does the file packages need to be on my system?
Where?
.gz or ascii?

I would like to use the dpkg-ftp, but I *think* that I need to 
install/configure the modem first...

I don't need each question awnsered individually if there are 
instructions (other than install.html) on this matter.

thank you, I am sure there are others with these questions..

mike cotherman
mjcother@ij.net