debian installation (dselect and dpkg) woes

[Mike Coleman]

Marvin Bellamy <Marvin.Bellamy at innovision.com> writes:
> 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.

Yeah, probably you'd need binary-all and several other things, including the
appropriate Packages and Release files.  The organization of these directories
has changed recently, which would probably complicate this task.

I wouldn't recommend installing this way unless you really know what you're
doing.  If the machines to be installed are hooked to the net, just installing
via download is probably easiest.  Otherwise I'd go for a CD.

Mike