Re: Getting dselect and apt-* to work from a local file system
Tommy McDaniel wrote:
> That doesn't seem like to me like what I want to do, but it could be.
> Basically, I downloaded the basic files to install Linux on my Windows
> partition and now want to use dselect to install packages, which will also
> have to be downloaded onto the Windows partition before being transferred
> over manually to the Linux partition. I read
> /usr/share/doc/apt/offline.text.gz, but unfortunately it didn't really solve
> my problem. I don't have another working Linux computer with apt on it to
> download the packages from, nor do I have the program spoken about in the
> second half of the file, even though if I did I would still want to download
> the files manually instead of using that program. I looked for
> /var/lib/apt/lists, but I have no such thing. I think all I had was
> /var/lib, with some stuff in there but no apt. Based on this, how can I
> finish setting up dselect? Everything works (or at least seems to) until I
> get to that error I mentioned in my original posting. I just need to
> download the files onto my Windows partition, transfer them over to the
> appropriate place on the Linux partition (I would assume
> /dists/stable/main/binary-i386/*, or contrib or non-free), and then have
> dselect and apt and dpkg and whatever it is that needs to work properly to
> work properly, while using dselect. I imagine it can be done, I'm just not
> sure what I need to do. Thank you already for your help.
>
Ok, you have installed the base system, and would like to install other
packages, all from stable (potato).
This make things easy, cause you don't need to update your packages list daily,
as if you were tracking testin/unstable (sid/potato) =)
You could follow the suggestion of Joost (it's amaze me the daily number of his
posts =) and use dpkg-scanpackages to create your personal "Packages" file...
My suggestion is, use dselect to choose what program to install (dselect will
check for dependencies) use "apt-get dselect-upgrade --print-uris to get the
list of package to download with windo~1.
Now, you have three options, install them manually with dpkg (tedious and boring
and prone to errors), install them using dselect (but i don't remember where
dselect stores the downloaded packages) or use apt-get telling him where to find
the downloaded packages, something like 'apt-get --o
dir::cache::archives="/mnt/debian-packages/" --dselect-upgrade', supposing you
have mounted your windo~1 partition in "/mnt" and the downloaded packages are
under "debian-packages" directory...
Regarding the apt-offline, in your case the best method is the third, with some
minor changes. You only need to find wget for windo~1, change the awk command
with the correct path where you have saved it on your windo~1 partition (f.e.
"c:\programs\wget.exe"), and finally, rename the "wget-script" in something like
"wget-script.bat"...
Andrea
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