Need help with Debian package management

[dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 12:20:11PM -0500, Bill Horne wrote:
> Thanks for reading this. I need help to solve a problem with Debian 
> packages.
> 
> I used Aptitude to add the GNU compiler to a new Debian Etch install. I 
> pushed the wrong button, because it took a day to download 5GB worth of 
> archives, and it installed a lot of kernels I can't use and games I 
> don't want, etc.

Erm, yes, that was amazing.

> I think I'll have to reinstall, since the operation for which I need the 
> compiler (adding Intel drivers for the 82865G chipset) won't work with 
> the current setup.

In future -- try 'apt-get install build-essentials module-assistant'

> I copied the /var/cache/apt/archives directory to another machine and 
> modified the sources.list file on the target, but doing apt-get update 
> produces this result:
> 
> Get:8 ftp://192.168.10.90 etch/main Packages
> Err ftp://192.168.10.90 etch/main Packages
>   Unable to fetch file, server said 
> '/var/cache/apt/archives/dists/etch/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz: No 
> such file or directory.  '

Sounds like there's an FTP proxy in the way.


> Now, the question: is it worth my time to construct a Debian archive of 
> the packages that I downloaded?

No, but it's worth keeping them.

What are you trying to do, now?

-dsr-


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