Subject: Installed from floppies, now what?

From: "Michael J. Cotherman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Aug 1996 16:35:54 -0700

Maybe I am missing the obvious, but would someone please tell me 
where to find instructions on installing packages?

I see dpkg and dselect mentioned, but when I use these commands, 
I feel that I am lost....

I do not have a distribution cd, nor do I want to purchase another 
set of disks that wil be outdated in a year....

I have downloaded some packages, do I keep them in a directory
system similar to what is on the ftp server, or do I put them all
in one directory?

When I start dselect, it asks me where certain things are , and 
I actually have very little idea what they are referring to..

Does the file packages need to be on my system?
Where?
.gz or ascii?

I would like to use the dpkg-ftp, but I *think* that I need to 
install/configure the modem first...

I don't need each question awnsered individually if there are 
instructions (other than install.html) on this matter.

thank you, I am sure there are others with these questions..

mike cotherman
[email-masked]

---

From: Graham Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996 15:57:11 +1000 (EST)

I personally find dselect very confusing.  I install all packages
using just dpkg (dselect is a front-end to dpkg). It is actually very
easy.  The only thing that is more difficult is in manually dealing
with dependencies between packages.

The simplest thing to do is to identify any packages you want, e.g.,
minicom, ppp, etc. Download your selected packages from any Debian
archive (best to get them from the stable distribution).  For the two
I mention above, this would be:

	stable/binary-i386/comm/minicom_1.75-1.deb
	stable/binary-i386/net/ppp_2.2.0f-2.deb

Once you have them on your Linux box you should check what other
packages they depend on:

	$ dpkg --info minicom_1.75-1.deb

This lists various things about the package.  Look for a line that
begins with "Depends: "

You can do a "dpkg --list" to see if you have all of the required
packages.

If so, then simply install the new package:

	$ dpkg --install minicom_1.75-1.deb

This actually unpacks the package and then configures the package.

If you don't like the package you can simply remove it with:

	$ dpkg --purge minicom

It removes all files that were installed and undoes appropriate
configurations.

Hope this helps.

(My Linux box is home at present so I'm working from memory but I've
done this often enough to be pretty sure it's correct.  The "--help"
option of dpkg lists all available options.)

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