How can I get the debian installer to acquire the first set of packages (which it wants) from my local HD (not the inet)?
(I'm just learning debian, and I've done this install several times (and expect to do it several more). Each time it takes about a half hour to get these packages from the net. I saved the deb files it dl'd. I just don't know how to place them & what else needs to be done (ie, "B2" from below).) I'm new to debian & haven't been able to find any doc on this yet. (Is this answered in some doc? If you know such a doc's name, I can read the instructions there.) I'm doing a debian install onto my HD starting from the files on the hard disk (on a w95 c:\linux directory (install.bat loadlin.exe rescue.bin root.bin linux base2_2.tgz drivers.tgz)). 1) I run install.bat from c:\linux 2) I tell the installer to get the base & drivers in c:\linux & it works with those. 3) I tell the installer to get the rest of the files from the inet with ppp. (I seem to recall that this occurs after the installer has rebooted from the system it just installed to the HD, but my memory isn't certain.) 4) Some part of the installer program downloads about 5MB from inet. 5) it installs the 5MB. I'd like to do it differently, starting at step 3 - A) How do I tell it to get the files from a local drive? B) What do I have to have set up on the local drive? : B1) The 5MB of deb files? (Of course. But: where? And, how do I point the installer to them?) B2) Some configuration information (Ex: this needs to be something like (I can't recall the words it used) a debian "archive" or "package repository" or "?". Possibly something to do with getting the files which contain the latest data on what the current deb packages are?)? (Note that: I've found out how to get dselect to get deb packages locally later on in the process - by putting the debs I saved after earlier installations into the /var/cache/apt directory. That won't seem to work for this problem, because /var/cache/apt doesn't even exist at the time it's asking me where I want to get the files from, and also it needs those "latest config" files, correct?) Thanks.
