Hello, as i am installing the same software on several systems i would like to speed up things by not needing to download them time and time again. is there a way that local stored packages can be added as a source to sources.list? if so, what would the correct syntax be? i have checked a few similar threads but none seem to address this issue.

thanks.
ron.

Search Google for "apt howto". It will be your first hit. See section 2.2 "How to use APT locally"

thanks i have copied this to a text file, when i get back from work i am going to fiddle with it.

when i was at work i thought of a new question which is really a similar one to this but not exactly: how to create cd's that synaptic will 'accept'? as with mepis extra's cd's; these cd's contain extra software meant for people that don't have (broadband) internet. by adding these cd's via synaptic to the repository you have instant access to the files on it. may be i should start a new thread for this one.

ron.

Hello haertig, your tip worked great! thanks. do not have a clue what an override file is but i typed it with /dev/null in the syntax and away it went! all is visible in synaptic now and it picks up the dreaded dependencies too!

It's not the "correct" way but it's easier.

I usually just copy the downloaded .deb files into /var/cache/apt/archives/ of the system I am going to upgrade. You have to apt-get update first so apt will know what versions are current, then do the apt-get install <package> (or upgrade or whatever...).

Apt will first look in /var/cache/apt/archives/ for the .deb files it needs before it attempts to download new files.

thanks CrashedAgain, i will do that too, sounds simple enough. hopefully it will not crash again.

Just an update for anyone else who is trying to share the same cache of downloaded packages over more than one system.

What I have been doing lately is to maintain the cache on a data drive (/media/hdb2/Debian/archives) and replace the /var/cache/apt/archives folder with a link to this location. I expected some problems but there doesn't seem to be any, other than that /media/hdb2/archives must also contain a subfolder "partial".

Procedure is to first copy all your archived packages that you want to keep to the new location, then . Then make the link :Biggest drawback seems to be that the archive keeps growing, I don't know of any easy way to keep only the latest versions of the packages & erase all the old ones.

thanks for that update, CrashedAgain. to link it to that other hard drive sounds like a good idea. this way the drive where the os lives on doesn't fill up with all these package files. i will put this to the test as i am about to upgrade a system. makes you even wonder if it is not a good idea to make a separate partition for the whole /var directory next time we reinstall a system from scratch. this way updating becomes a much quicker process.

I don't think you could use a shared /var directory for multiple systems; each system would need to maintain separate log files, etc.