> On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Joel Gautschi wrote: > > > I have a debian (slink) pc at home. Sometimes I want to update > > some packages or even the whole system - f.e. to a later debian > > dist. the problem is that I don't have a static connection to the > > internet (or sth like that) at home. My connection isn't fast > > enough if i want to upgrade to a later debain-dist... (-> it would > > cost a lot of money). the best solution would be if I could.... > > generate a list of the needed packages for upgrade on my linux pc > > at home (f.e. with apt-get). > > I'm somewhat sharing this problem. My problem is now to install > Debian in a machine. It is connected to the net, but I cannot make > that connection using Linux at the moment. The base is already > installed, but > > 1) I wanted to install a predefined standard system. 2) How can I > get easily a list of the packages needed? > > I could put all the neede packages on a zip-disk. Both win and > debian can read and write on that zip-disk, but the netconnection is > now only with win95.
Looks a little tricky, but doable. What you'll need to do is copy files from a Debian FTP mirror on to your Zip disk or other media, and put them in a directory /dists/unstable/main/binary-i386 (or whatever your architecture is). To get dselect to prompt you for packages with "standard" priority and updated base packages, copy the Packages.gz and Release files to binary-i386. Then, on your Debian machine, add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list: deb file:/mnt/ unstable main Assuming you mounted the zip disk on /mnt. Then do "apt-get-update." This *should* fool apt into thinking the lastest versions of packages are availible. Go into dselect's [S]elect step and write down everything that you need to get (There's probably an automatic way to do this, I don't know.) Now you can get the packages from your local mirror of ftp.debian.org over the fast connection, and dump them in binary-i386/. At thins point I would just mount the disk and do "dpkg -i *.deb", but you can also use dpkg-scanpackages to recreate the Packages file, and then just gzip it and run apt-get upgrade (or dist-upgrade). Anyway, disclaimer: if you don't want to go potato, just replace "unstable" with "stable". I have not tested this at all!! it may be wrong somewhere. If so, email me, so that I can figure it out for you and have the right answer next time. Hope this helps. -- Debian GNU/Linux - http://www.debian.org/ The Web is to graphic design as the fax machine is to literature.
