Subject: Debian Package Setup

From: Me <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 14:45:21 -0600

Hi folks here's what I want to do:

I have a dos partition that I made of about 20megs that I put
DOS/WINDOWS install programs on.
so now I have 4 partitions one for WIN95, Linux, Linux-swap,and a Dos
partition.

I have read the help and information docs on dselect but could not find
or understand what I should do to make this work.

I set LILO so I can boot into Linux then get into as root. I mount hda3
to /mnt and fd0 to /floppy. I want to add gcc and some info packages to
my Linux system. I believe you have to have packages.gz in the same
directory as your *.deb stuff so I did that. Now I run dselect and I
pick that I have a mounted hardrive I want to work from. After this
point I get lost. I get a bunch of queation asking where package.gz is
and some other stuff I type in /mnt/linux for all of them because thats
where all *.deb and packages.gz are. It then ask me to configure the
packages. Is there auto config where I sit back and let it install
everything it can find. and what does the dpkg program do? Is it a
manual way of installing *.deb's. 

Help?

---

From: Jeppe Sigbrandt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 05:13:56 +0100

> or understand what I should do to make this work.

Hi,

dpkg, is a manual version of dselect.  dselect is simply a
user friendly interface to dpkg. I think the best way to find out more 
about dpkg is to do

	dpkg -help | less

For dselect, try the directory /usr/doc/debian/ which contains
	FAQ                                  
	dselect-install-instructions.txt.gz

I have found dselect easy to use when the directory structure
of the debian ftp site is preserved.  It warns that this is the
preferred way.

If you're only wanting a few packages, simply try

	dpkg -i path_to_package.deb

That should work. (I installed about 10 packages today in this
way, and life couldn't have been simpler)  

Then run dselect to see if there are any
dependency problems or pending configuration jobs.

Regards,
jay