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I wanted to ask you guys if there is any alternative to prevent from insert over and over again, the CD's of the Sarge distro when installing a program or package.
See my problem is that I do not have internet at home so I rely mainly in the CD's I have downloaded - but I find really annoying that every time I install ( say for instance mplayer) anything I have to switch between the 14 CD's available in order to complete the installation.
Is there an easier way to do this?
A while ago I heard the possibility to keep the CD's .iso images in the harddrive ( or an external drive ( or something )) and tell the /etc/apt/sources.list file where to look for.
There should be a way that you could copy the content of the discs and put them in your own repository for apt on your box as well. Search google and here for creating a local respoitory.
I think Debian is probably a pretty good choice for a non-internet connected system, since so much is included in the distro, but I'm not really that experienced with other distros.
If you copy the whole of the CDs you need to a spare partition (and at 14 CDs, you'll need a good 10Gb spare, at least), you can add that to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. You may want to comment out the CD entries with a # as well. Here's an example:
You should then run apt-get update. With any luck you will now not be asked to pop in any CDs.
I am unsure of the exact tree structure necessary, but I would have thought that if you copy every CD exactly as it's found then you should be OK. If not, you could always try making ISOs of the CDs and loopmounting them, but that's a whole different story!
Thymox,...thank you for the time spared in helping me on this subject.
However, although I am almost understanding the way it should be done in order to function properly, I will need a little more guidance.
For instance:
if I created a separate partition and on that partition I have a folder ( say sarge-cd1-packages ) and then copy the content of each cd to each corresponding folder ( not as an image file ) and then making an entry in the /etc/apt/sources.list like:
- - > deb file://hda4/sarge-cd1-packages/sarge main
the I could get the machine to retrieve all the packages fron that source? Would that be it?
If I were to try creating the .iso images how would that differ from this method described above?
Would you know of a good HowTo - Guide regarding this issue?
Hi, I 'll give a good solution i am using it , very nice solution!!!
Create a webserver on a machine , say example at adresse 192.168.10.10
on this machine put all your CD's on a directory say , /var/www/Debian , I suppose that the default directory for the web is /var/www,
put all the CD in this directory( if you have extra deb software, you can add them here or in another directory, the procedure is the same) ( /var/www/Debian )
create the Packages.gz with the command : go to the /var/www
cd /var/www
dpkg-scanpackages Debian /dev/null | gzip > Debian/Packages.gz
that is all in the web server.
Now if you want to install or to add a package in any machine which of course can access to the web server put the following command in the /etc/apt/sources and nothing else
Now if I understand correctly, what you are telling me is to create and configure a web server; once done that 'copy' all the .deb packages in the /var/www/Debian directory ?
I thought about the ISO setup a while ago when I wanted access to local Mandrake RPM repositories (I wasn't on broadband then) and I wanted to maintain the ISO files of the distro (and contribs, and PLF) so I could burn them for friends.
Basically what I did with Mandrake was I kept the ISO files on the harddrive, created separate mount points for each one (/mnt/install-cds/disc-X), added entries for each file into the fstab, ensuring that I give it an option "loop":
Then I would mount each directory and use Mandrake's package manager thingy to define some new RPM repository, ensuring that I selected "removable media" for each. This way whenever I needed to install something from the "CDs", it'd loop-mount the ISO file in the appropriate place, pull the RPMs from it and then umount it again.
Now, I know we're talking about Debian systems here, but the principle should work in the same way. Create/keep the ISO files of your 14CDs on your harddrive somewhere accessible, create mountpoints for each one, create separate entries for each one in your fstab, edit your sources.list accordingly.
If you have no need to keep full ISO images on your drive, you just want to keep the debs, then I can see no reason why you can't just copy them (keeping the directory structure in tact, perhaps) somewhere and then have your sources.list file point there.
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