I'm ready to try Debian again and to get it to boot into X (last time I got signal errors, probably because I guessed my monitor specs, which I have now). I like Mandrake...but depdency hell and slow app loading times (though I can't say that that is Mandy's fault) make me want to get Debian to work badly.

I do know apt-get works. I fear one thing though. I am on broadband right now, but I won't have access to it forever. When you get things through apt-get, does it get stored somewhere locally? If it does, can I back it up and then apt-get from the local source? And if it does, what gets backed up? The main packages or does it store the dependencies too. I'd hate for it to say, "you have electric eyes, but you are missing the following GNOME components for it to work, can i go online and fetch them". I just don't want to have to stay on a dial-up for hours on end installing things again, if I can hold them over from broadband days.

Thanks for your help.

I think they land in /var/cache/apt...

You may copy .deb files to anywhere you want and can even create your own repository (even adding it to your sources.list).

You probably want to read "man apt-get", look in /usr/share/doc/apt, and also read
http://www.debian.org/doc/user-manuals#apt-howto

I just did this last night, I used apt-get at school (T1) on my office computer to get the kde 3.1.3 packages and their dependencies. After they were installed I burned /var/cache/apt/archives to cd, brought the cd home, copied the *.deb files to my local /var/cache/apt/archives directory and then updated kde to 3.1.3 and only had to get a very few packages from the internet through my dial-up. Note: your sources.list must have the available packages listed in it or they won't be installed, so on both computers I had to put the latest download.kde.org URI in my sources list.

HTH

~rock