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I was talking to a local sysadmin and he was saying that debian is a nightmare to install...So i wanted to see why and if this was the case. I downloaded the appropiated cds for my arch and began the install. I managed to get cd1 to install fine except for slight networking problems which i was going to fix later. But the install did no request any of the further install media. So i rebooted and logged in as root mounted cd2 and browsed it looking for packages and a window manager. I got on google on found you use 'dpkg -i package.deb' to install stuff so i tried this. I kept getting dependency errors and conflicts (seemingly cyclic). So my question is how can I install all the good packages? And is there a way to install all at once and not one by one? Would 'dpkg -i *deb' do the trick?
What you need to do is add the other CD's or a debian network repsoitry to apt.
If you look in /etc/apt/sources.list You will find that this will have links to the CD you have, you can add the others. Your best bet though is a network archive. Debian has an Apt Howto with all the details.
dpkg can be used if you have an individual package, but Debian has the much more powerful apt-get command, that will solve the dependancies for you.
it installs the testing build of debian (sarge). you still need to use apt-get to install things like X and KDE and stuff like that, but it is a great way to learn debian and have a great distro as well
You say that additional CDs can be added to "../sources.list".
Is that by 'dselect : update' ?
And if I want to install a certain pkg should I grep sources.list to find the full correct name?
Or should I guess (or is there a table) which type and which section that pkg is in and then find it?
Finally, can I add sarge CDs to the list of a woody install?
I am doing this for learning and not because it is the best way to go.
No. You will use apt-cdrom add for each cd you have. then you can either run dselect or apt-get install aptitude and use aptitude to install your software. (I'd choose aptitude. each software category is a collapsed group as opposed to looking at one long list of packages, unless you don't mind taking the 30minutes it'll take.)
You could try running "base-config" It will go through the basic setup of your computer and allow you to set up apt to use your CDs or ftp/http. It will also run "tasksel" that will allow you to select groups of software to install based on what tasks you want to do.
And if I want to install a certain pkg should I grep sources.list to find the full correct name?
Or should I guess (or is there a table) which type and which section that pkg is in and then find it?
You use the command "apt-cache search XXX" from the command-line to search for software. XXX represents your search string. `apt-cache search php` will return many packages. Then you `apt-get install packagename. That's it. Debian handles the dependencies for you. No RPM dependency hell.
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