Hello Joost and thanks for the reply. I've been tinkering with dselect and I think I've figured out enough to get it to do what it can for me......as far as that goes.
But I'm trying to do a "custom" install with alots of selected packages for a bastion host/firewall. This would be cumbersome to do by hand on the three machines that would make up the firewall. Also, we are trying to come up with a somewhat automated and well worked out procedure for building a Debian based firewall, see: http://www.weikert.de/debwall/ and debian-firewall@lists.debian.org therefore I believe dselect just will not have the functionality required for this project and that is why I'm looking into dpkg. It looks as if dpkg can probably pull it off.....I'm just not sure how to use it in this complex scenario.....I've used it for simpler stuff and it works great.....installing a kernel dselect couldn't find for instance (2.0.33). so my question remains, what are the steps? ????????????????????????????? base install su mount cdrom cd /mnt/stable dpkg --set-selections < /tmp/custom_package_list -R ????????????????????????????? I've got some new machines coming in this morning so I'll try this out blindly soon, but would appreciate any guidance from the gurus. Thanks Henry Hollenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .