Using apt-get

[Lincoln Peters]

>From: "Karsten M. Self" <kmself at ix.netcom.com>
>Reply-To: <talk at nblug.org>
>To: talk at nblug.org
>Subject: Re: Using apt-get
>Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2003 20:44:53 +0000
>There are several ways a CD can become corrupted.  If you bought the
>disks from a vendor, have the media replaced.  If you burned the disk
>yourself, check the source ISO, run md5sum on it and check against the
>checksum.  If the image file checks out OK, try burning a new copy.  If
>it doesn't match the checksum, then you'll have to reload the image.

I burned the CD's myself.  On Wednesday, I brought my laptop to the SSU 
library and downloaded all seven ISO's.  It took me about threee hours.

>
>If you're in the US and have reasonably fast (56k or better) and
>unmetered network access, you can simply download packages over the net.
>For most purposes, this takes only a few minutes, though larger packages
>or package sets might be better done overnight.

The package set I need adds up to about 144MB.  I could probably handle that 
on a 56k modem.

>
>This seems to be what you want.
>
> > I've noticed that whenever a new version of a package is available on
> > Debian's security site, apt-get installs that instead of the version
> > on the CD.  Is there some way to tell apt-get to fall back to an FTP
> > server if a package on the CD is unreadable?
>
>Yes.
>
>You can use 'apt-setup' to add network sources to your
>/etc/apt/sources.list file.  You'll probably want something like:
>
>
>     deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
>     deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib 
>non-free
>     deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
>
>...in addition to your cdrom sources.

I checked the sources.list file, and it listed the CD's first, then the 
FTP/HTTP servers.  Although it seems that it only used the FTP servers if 
the files were not on the CD's; it would give up if the problem with the CD 
was something other than that the package was not there.

>
>Run:
>
>    # apt-get update
>
>...to fetch package lists.
>
>Then install a given package with:
>
>    # apt-get install package
>
>Or if you want to do a general update 'apt-get dist-upgrade', if you
>want to use a front-end package picker, try 'aptitude'.

I was actually using dselect.  It seems to work fine (as a frontend, at 
least), but I found myself spending four hours reading through the list of 
available packages!

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