On Sun, May 23, 1999 at 04:52:24PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote > > Sounds like more trouble that it is work. Slink packages (usually) don't > > change, > > because they are the stable distribution. Right now, packages in unstable > > are > > changing. I use apt-get in the apt package to do what you want to do, > > keep my system up to date. > > > One thing I was hoping to avoid...I haven't seen slink/apt yet, but I am aware > that it will install from multiple CD's...under the previous release, I had > copied the binaries of Contrib/Non-Free/Non-US to my hard drive, left the i386 > CD in the tray, and told dselect that I was installing from the hard drive. > Then, I could tell dselect the paths to each of the sets of packages, and it > installed all without my having to change CD's (which the previous release > wouldn't do, anyway). > > Will I be able to get a Non-Free and Non-US CD, and will apt do the multiple > install from them? Or, if not, how do I make apt aware of where I am keeping > those sets of files? >
Dselect in slink provides a 'multi-CD' access method that works well with properly-made CD sets. Apt in slink doesn't support multiple CDs well at all, although apt-0.3.4 from potato does and works fine for me on slink systems. Slink doesn't fit onto a single CD, so you will need some way of dealing with at least two CDs anyway; multi-CD access is the most straightforward, but your old scheme should still work. I don't use the 'official' CDs, but I think non-free & non-US will make it three CDs or so; if you want to use multi-CD access in dselect I believe that the CDs must be designed to work together as a set (or at least, one of them must be designed to work with the other two), as the contents of the entire set are read from one of the CDs. apt-0.3.4 appears extremely flexible, and I expect that it would work with just about any collection of reasonably well organised CDs. If you 'need' non-US and non-free packages you should be able to find a set that puts slink, contrib, non-US and the re-distributable bits of non-free onto 2 CDs (but that would exclude, among other things, Netscape). If you use apt-0.3.4 or working equivalent you can use apt with the official CD set for main and contrib, and http for non-free & non-US, 'transparently'. John P. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Oh - I - you know - my job is to fear everything." - Bill Gates in Denmark
