Re: Trouble with apt-cache and aptitude

[Bjørn Michelsen <bjorn@bmichelsen.no>]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 05:32:05PM -0400, Alan McConnell wrote:

Hey there,

> I've been running Debian since 'sarge' was new -- other distributions
> before that -- and on Saturday I finally made the move from 'etch'
> to 'squeeze'.  I reinstalled, using my eight DVDs that I had bought
> from LinuxCollections.com.
> 
> The install went beautifully, and my system is now very elegant, as
> far as it exists.  But I noticed that I used only Disk 1.
> 
> Now I want to install e.g. Lilypond(the music typesetter) and
> the Window Manager sawfish.  But when I go e.g.
>     apt-cache search lilypond
> (from a terminal, naturally) the prompt returns immediately.  Same
> for sawfish, and various other recondite programs.
> 
> I am starting to feel that the database of all that is one these
> disks is not available to me.  Are the disks perhaps flawed? (hard
> to believe, since the install went so well)   Is there any way of
> adjusting something so that  apt-cache and aptitude work as well
> as they did with my 'etch' DVDs?

Did you add them to your sources.list with apt-cdrom? That is,

  # -d being mount point
  apt-cdrom -d=/cdrom add

If that doesn't work, then please paste /etc/apt/sources.list so we can
have a go at it, and hopefully figure out what's going on.

Anyway, hope that solves your problem.

-- 
Sincerely,
Bjorn Michelsen