Okay, I've recently installed Debian on my laptop. My initial plan was to install it, and then get the new GNOME 3 immediately downloaded from the experimental repos and proceed to use it. When installing Debian, I've decided not to install a graphical desktop environment, because my reasoning at that time was, "Why clog the system up if I'm going to switch to GNOME 3 anyway?". so I didn't install it.

I've now been reminded of how annoying it is to work (at least for a newb like me) without any graphical desktop elements.

So my question is, for now, I want to install the normal, default GNOME 2.3 desktop back on my machine. I can of course simply reinstall the entire OS (my new Debian install is quite fresh anyway) and just install it with the Graphical desktop option checked.

However, I've decided to be a little more experimental and do the old fashioned "learn how my Linux system works". I know how to set-up wifi commandline only, and with that I can just do apt-get install gnome-core, but installing the Gnome desktop that way will take a huge nearly 800 mb out of my bandwidth, which is out of the question.

I then realized, I have the gnome desktop anyway on the installation CD. I've looked at the CD's pool folder, and browsed through it, and noticed a lot of gnome-related packages.

What I want to do, is transfer the .deb files from the /pool folder in the Debian installation CD to my Debian distro, and then just install the X11 window system and GNOME through that.

What I did so far, was I ran

without actually running it, and it spat out a LONG list of packages. Am I correct in thinking that to get the same thing, all I do is take those packages from the pool directory, put them on Debian and just run dpkg on every single one?

And then next time I log in, I'll be able to log in to the GNOME desktop?

I haven't done it personally, so the specifics escape me, but you can set up sources.list to point to only the CD (no online repositories) and then sudo apt-get install gnome.

gnome is a meta package that simply drags in all the gnome stuff as dependencies, and having your sources.list point to only the installation CD means you won't get gnome 3 (which is what you would get if you did it online).

Someone who knows the precise syntax for your sources.list will have to come along to give you that info.

uncomment the deb line that corresponds to your cd in your /etc/apt/sources.list file

It should be there.

Then all you have to do is:

and the packages should get pulled from the CD (if they are the latest version available.)

I hadn't realised that the CD sources will already be in the sources.list (not in mine but I may have changed it). However, I still think it may be wise to comment everything else out, just to make sure that there is nothing newer than the CD available.

Thanks a ton guys! And to the first comment yeah, I only want to have the GNOME 2.3 that originally came with the package.

And about the second comment, do I have to be connected to the internet? Setting up wifi via bash only can be done but it's a pain.

And the format for all the packages in the /pool/main area of the installation CD is a list of directories, each one with the name of the ltter of the alphabet, eg /a, /b , /c, /d, /e etc. and then the packages corresponding there. So doing:

is fine for that?

Well, you live and learn. See here for adding the cd to sources.list: http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011...list-file.html

To ensure that nothing else is searched for by apt, before adding the cd comment out everything in sources.list, then add the CD.

At this point, you don't need to be connected to the internet. apt will ONLY look to the local cd for packages. The command posted is fine for that.

I would add a word of caution, though. Once you're done if you are hell bent on using gnome and don't want gnome 3 dragging in, you may want to look at apt pinning to prevent it getting updated as and when you restore your repository sources and go online, otherwise your system will want to update it to gnome 3 the first chance it gets.