APT Black Magic Solved...
My thanks to Ron and T.J. for their earlier posts about my problem.
With their suggestions and a little more trouble shooting I was able
to solve the problem. I wanted to post the solution to the list so
others might find it when searching the archives.
The original problem was that APT and Synaptic were unable to find the
debs I had placed in a directory on my local hard drive. The error
message I received was similar to the following:
W: Failed to fetch file://home/myuser/home/myuser/debs/sampleprogram.deb
I had placed the correct line in my /etc/apt/sources.list file
pointing to the directory, and I had also successfully created a
Packages.gz file with the "dpkg-scanpackages" command.
The clue that led me to the solution was the error message. I noticed
that it repeated part of the path to my local directory containing the
debs. ("home/myuser/home/myuser") I extracted the packages text file
from the Packages.gz file that I generated with "dpkg-scanpackages". I
checked the path listed under the "Filename:" section of each package
entry. The path was similar to "/home/myuser/debs/sampleprogram.deb".
I decided to trim the "/home/myuser" from all of the filename paths
listed in the packages text file, leaving just
"/debs/sampleprogram.deb". It worked! APT and Synaptic can now install
the files. I'm no expert, but I'm guessing that since the Packages.gz
file was already in the /home/myuser/debs/ directory that the filename
paths didn't need the "/home/myuser" on their path.
I hope that this message will save someone else the time I spent
figuring this out.
Scott Huey
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