Normal CD drive on laptop is highly unwilling to read writeable media CD's. So how may I get aptitude or apt or whatever to use an external USB read/writer? Dselect makes provision for this but when I try mount says the file system is unknown - and this is odd because the CD has already been mounted on dpkg's special mount point.

I just now looked at a previous post and it says it's as easy as mounting the external drive on the internal drive's mount point. Is this so? It sound implausible.

The packages databases for these things seem to be a bit screwed. Is there any way to wipe it and start again?

Am trying to load in Lenny testing. TIA.

Section 2.4 of the Apt Howto

In fact this works, but you have to do it in /etc/fstab.

Thanks Junior Hacker, that's obviously the correct way to do it: # apt-cdrom -d /home/kov/mycdrom add.