debian installation (dselect and dpkg) woes

[Marvin Bellamy]

I don't have the CD, I FTP'd the debian CD's relevant binary 
subdirectories.  "...downloaded the CD..." was a really bad way for me 
to phrase that.  I downloaded the binary-i386 directories plus other 
miscellaneous while preserving their relative locations under dists.  I 
could be missing something else...possibly, I need binary-all?  When I 
attempt to install packages, I see error messages that indicate dselect 
is looking in dists/potato/main rather than dists/stable/main.  In any 
case, I thought there might be something obvious and boneheaded I was 
doing wrong.  I haven't put in an honest effort to resolve this I guess. 
 Ordering the Debian CD is probably the easiest way to go.

Mike Coleman wrote:

>Marvin Bellamy <Marvin.Bellamy at innovision.com> writes:
>
>>Problem now is setting up my
>>sources.list file to read from the hard drive.  Assuming I downloaded the CD
>>to:
>>
>>/dos1/linux/debian/dists/stable/<main|contrib|non-free>
>>
>>what should my source be?  I've used:
>>
>>deb file:/dos1/linux/debian stable main contrib non-free
>>
>>with no success.  I'd hate to install by HTTP or FTP after all that
>>downloading to get the packages.
>>
>
>What does "downloaded the CD" mean exactly?  If you have a Debian CD, why not
>just install directly from it?
>
>You mention using dselect, so I'm thinking this means you already have a base
>system installed and you're just trying to add packages.  Is that right?
>
>The 'file' URI you're using looks reasonable (though I've never tried this
>myself).  The problem could be that what's at that URI isn't a well-formed
>archive.  Maybe some files are missing or misplaced.  I do seem to recall that
>apt doesn't give particularly helpful error messages if sources.list is bogus.
>
>Mike
>