Re: Merging all 30+ Debian CD's -- vs DVDs
On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 09:25:08 -0400, Alan McConnell wrote:
[...]
> Forgive me for writing about this at some length, since I'm faced with
> the same dilemma. My goals: I want to upgrade from sarge to etch,
> and to this end, I bought three(3) DVDs, instead of thirty(30) CDs.
> I also have a new USB-connected DVD Reader/Writer. A hurdle in the
> way is: my BIOS won't let me boot from a USB device.
You don't have to boot from the DVDs in order to upgrade, unless you
want to upgrade by wiping out your existing Sarge system and installing
Etch from scratch (which should not be necessary).
> There is a question at the end of this account, by the way<G>.
>
> I should add: after an upgrade succeeds, I want the capability to
> apt-cache search for something, and then apt-get install that
> something, with the standard prompt: "Please insert DVD x in your
> DVD device, and then press Enter . . "
That is a very reasonable wish; in fact, things are meant to work
exactly like that. Keep in mind, though, that you should have
http://security.debian.org/ in your sources.list in addition to the
DVDs.
[...]
> I start with having my DVD Reader/Writer mentioned in my /etc/fstab.
> It can be mounted on /media/dvd.
>
> So I ran apt-cdrom -d /media/dvd add and this seems to have
> run successfully. I was prompted to insert my new etch DVDs one
> by one into the DVD Reader/Writer, and the DVDs were inspected and
> information from them recorded(I'm not sure where!). So far, so
> good.
>
> I then went on to the actual upgrade. I ran apt-get update
> which, as expected, returned me nothing.
>
> I then ran apt-get dist-upgrade . I immediately received a
> couple of screens full, listing stuff that would be upgraded, and
> told that an extra 480meg of disk would be needed, did I wish to
> proceed? Well, I had made sure that I had this space -- so far
> so good -- so I entered Y.
Be aware that you should not blindly do a dist-upgrade to go from Sarge
to Etch. The transition involves a kernel upgrade and a few other
significant changes, therefore it is important to follow the procedure
described in the release notes:
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html
> Now comes the sick part: I immediately got a prompt: "Please insert
> Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r3 _Etch_ - Official i386 DVD Binary-1 20080217-11:31
> into the drive '/cdrom/' and then press enter" ! ! ! I put the
> called for DVD in the only place it would go, into my DVD Reader/Writer,
> and pressed Enter. I got the same prompt back.
I think the problem is that apt tries to use the default mount point
(/cdrom) now instead of /media/dvd.
> Finally my question: why? what did I do wrong? at one point the
> upgrade process did seem to know about my DVD apparatus. And it knows
> about the DVDs. But it can't make the connection, it seems.
My guess is that your /etc/fstab entry still lists /media/dvd as the
mount point for DVDs. This was OK for apt-cdrom because you used the
corresponding "-d /media/dvd" option, but apt does not know about this.
I think you either have to change the mount point given in /etc/fstab to
/cdrom (and maybe manually create the /cdrom directory if it does not
exist yet) or you have to put
Acquire::cdrom::mount "/media/dvd";
into apt's configuration. The best way to do the latter is to generate a
dedicated file in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d and put this line in there.
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
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