Here's part 2.... I actually muddle through the APT HOWTO last night and figured out the dpkg-scanpackages comand. I used it to successfully scan 3 packages I moved from the CDROM to my /root/debs directory. It created the Packages file, which I opened with nano to verify the content. It appeared to be a binary file. However, when I fire up Synaptic I get an error message about the packages: "W: Couldn't stat source package list file: debs/Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists /_root_debs_Packages) -stat (2 No such file or directory)" I also added the line "deb file:/root debs/" to the /etc/apt/sources.list file, as instructed in the APT HOWTO. Any idea why I am getting the error message. How might I go about fixing it? Thanks, Scott