On Sunday 29 July 2001 9:04 am, Johnny Ernst Nielsen wrote: > > Would that be: > deb http://kde.tdyc.com potato main qt1apps optional crypto > ...as David Dayan-Rosenman suggested?
This might well work, but it isn't what I use. My sources list has this line: deb http://kde.debian.net potato main crypto optional i.e. I don't bother with Qt1 applications and I go to a different host (which may well be an alias for tdyc.com). Of course we should really both be using one of the mirror sites and I'd forgotten I'd changed to the main site a while ago when my European mirror was having problems... > > Or should it be fine to use "apt-cdrom add" to add the CD I burned with the > KDE packages I downloaded on it? Yes, theoretically this will work. But only if you have all the files in the right directory structure and the Packages.gz file in the right place and so on. Trying to do this on the first install seems to be making things unnecessarily hard. I strongly suggest you use an online installation the first time. > I take it that I should also Update? Yes. > > 4. Using dselect make sure KDM is selected as a desktop login manager. > > Do you mean that I should make sure that kdm is selected for installation? > It is. Yes, that's what I mean. > > 5. Install it all. > > > 6. Reboot, which should lead you to the KDM login screen. > > It dosn't. Then perhaps KDM isn't installed. Perhaps you didn't download that deb file? What does "dpkg --status kdm" say? > Hmm... I seriously suspect that what I have on my CD is not everything > needed to install KDE. Yes, or the Packages files is wrong in some way. > > A couple of things though. > It sounds like the files I already downloaded were not the full set of > files needed to install KDE. > If the http://-thingy-line is the right thing to put in my sources.list > then it sounds like I need to open an Internet connection before installing > and that dselect will pull the needed files from the Internet. > > Is that correct? Yes > > I have already downloaded 171 files. It took about 5 > hours. I thought they were the full set of files needed, but it sounds like > they were not. > I have burned them on a CD. > Is there any way I can tell Debian to _not_ download those files again? > Five hours is a long time. Yes there is. The beauty of apt or dselect is that it figures out what is needed and downloads only that. You may well have downloaded far too many files already, but still be missing something you need. Again, I strongly advise the use of online installations and upgrades. I normally use apt but I also use dselect from time to time when I want more control over exactly which suggested packages get installed. Anyway the answer to your question is that both apt and dselect (when using apt access method) will use the first source listed if a file is available from more than one location. So if the cdrom line is before the http line in the souces list file and apt finds a package is both on the cdrom and on the internet then it will use the local package in preference. This is perfect because it means you only go to the net for updated packages. > > Also I will want to install KDE on other Debian 2.2r3 computers, some of > which have no Internet connection and no kind of network connection. > Is there any way I can make a usable KDE installation CD out of whatever > dselect downloads for my KDE installation? > Yes, in principle. There is a deb package called apt-move that is supposed to help create a local package hierarchy. Personally I had no success with this but I mention it as it may be of use. I have a desktop machine and a laptop and only every download debs to the desktop, then I create a local hierarchy out of the apt cache manually and point my laptop's sources list to the desktop (which runs boa as a webserver). Of course, the two machines are networked so this is not an option in your case. The only problem I had, and I never worked out the cause, is that colon characters in the package names were getting translated to an escape sequence in the cache. I had to write a shell script to convert the filenames back. Let me know if you need this. David