Hi guys, I'm new (hence, the post count of 1). I hope this is the right forum or it hasn't been posted before (I did search). Anyway...

I have the first 10 Debian Etch Testing cds. I pop the first one into my drive (desktop, P3 933mhz) and boot from it. I can get the base system installed correctly, but when it comes to installing the rest of the packages (Desktop, Web server, etc), it doesn't even mention the rest of the 10 cds, and only tries to download packages off the internet (which won't work, since I have no internet connection on that computer).

Okay, I say. I have a base system and no packages like KDE or whatever. So I stick in my old Sarge stable cd, and install from that, because I know that installer does packages off cd. Upgrading the packages won't work, which annoys me.

So I grab a free Ubuntu cd my friend gave me, install that, and then add the debian cds and try to apt-get upgrade (or whatever the command is, I cannot remember now). Needless to say, it does not work.

So my question is: Is there any way I can make the Etch installer get packages off the cd? I'm decent with Linux, but I'm no expert. I'd really love some help, because I've used Debian in the past, and was happy with it, and I'd like to go back to it.

Thanks in advance.

you need to edit your apt.sources list in /etc/apt to include all your CDs...

i think it can also be done with:

dpkg-reconfigure apt

hopefully a debian guru will jump in here and help out.

Try using apt-cdrom add to configure/add them to the sources.list if necessary you can always edit the file later and remove the lines that reference the internet.

So I should install the base system, then do that, then what should I do to install all the other software?

Thanks for the help so far, guys.

I never had to do that. It always prompted for the correct cd number. Are you using the official etch installer or a nightly build?

My friend gave me the CDs. I think it is a weekly build. Do those exist?

If your installing the base system then you get the choice for the source to install other packages from just choose CDROM and I believe it asks you to put in each CD in turn scans them then you install as nomal with apt-get, aptitude ... you will just need to put the cdrom in that contains the package(s) being installed. To answer your other question yes they have daily and weekly builds of the CD's that I know of.

I remember it used to do that with the old installer. But with the new one, it doesn't, it just assumes I am downloading from the internet.

Ok then its apt-cdrom then and edit out the URL lines for the internet.

Yeah, weekly build exists.

Happytux is also correct that during installation it should prompt you for each cd.

My brother had a wireless modem that we could only get working eventulaly using ndiswrapper. But the point it, we installed a KDE desktop on etch using the cd's. I remember being impressed that I did not have to keep going back and for from discs during apt-get. It new which one to ask for by number and did not ask for the same cd twice during an apt session.

Just curious. You are not doing apt-get update after your install are you?

Nope. Just sticking in the first disc and doing what it says. Tried all the menu options, but to no effect.

Anyway, I fixed the problem by installing Slackware.

You could install Slackware but not Debian? I have a lot of respect for Slackware (I don't me this as a dis) but I always though slack would be a harder install.

(And yes I know I have never bother to verify this, I have just been happy with my Debian for 2 + years now.)

Yeah, Slackware was surprisingly easy to install. I don't know what will happen when I try to upgrade the system (probably brown smoke) but for the moment I am fine.

The only thing I don't like about Slackware is that it uses Lilo and not GRUB. I might have to fix that, because Lilo really annoys me.

I'm getting the same problem too. I'm using the weekly build and have no internet connection. The installation does not seem to ask for other CDs and I get very few packages listed in the "Select and install packages" part of the installation. I ended up with no gui interface. Do I need to download another version of the distribution?

Edit: I tried using aptitude to install gnome but I get 2 broken packages which when "fixed" remove all the gnome packages and therefore gnome is not installed. The CD's MD5 is accurate.

Same problem here...