On Mon, 2 Mar 1998, Henry Hollenberg wrote: > I have a particular list of packages I would like to install saved in > a file and am using a 3 CD-ROM Debian 1.3.1 set I got with Dale Scheetz's > book as my media. > > I imagine I need to mount the cdrom and use dpkg --get-selections and > dpkg --set-selections and maybe cd to the cdrom stable directory then do > some sort of dpkg -R command....
No, you just need to use the dselect program. > but I have no idea how to hang all these steps together. Dselect takes care of most of the detail work. > Anybody know how to do this?....type/talk slowly so I can see your > lips move. First become superuser (root) to be able to make system-level changes; you do this with the command "su -" and typing in root's password at the prompt. Next, type the "dselect" command. Now, read slowly what messages dselect shows on screen, or you might get confused at a later stage about the purpose of the questions dselect asks you and what keypresses are at your disposition to instruct dselect. Generally, every time dselect comes up with a screen of informative text, read it thoroughly before hitting the "space" key. Another valuable piece of knowledge is that pressing the "?" key brings you to a help screen, where you can find out about the general purpose and setup of dselect (more or less what I'm typing here) and about specific keybindings. The first time you are going to use your cd, you'll have to set the "Access method". If you have installed the system from cd, then it probably isn't necessary set the access method again and you can skip this step. Every time you insert a new cd, you have to "Update the available list", so that the dselect engine (called dpkg) knows what packages are available for installation. If you just want to add a package from a cd that you have previously used, then you can safely assume that dpkg still knows what's available and skip this step. Next comes the "Select" part. This is often the most difficult and confusing part because it requires the most user interaction. You're first shown an informative text. Read it. When you're finished, you arrive at the list of available packages. The list shows a lot of information at once, so don't be confused. If you are not sure about the meaning of symbols, just press "?" and read the on-line documentation. Because there are so many available packages (more then you would ever want - or even could - install on your system,) it is the easiest to find a package by its name if you know a part of that. Press "/" and type a part of the package's name and hit "enter". If that gives a result that is not quite right, press "\" (yes, I know, this isn't the most intuitive key for the job) to search for the next match until you find what you're looking for. To mark a package for installation, you move the selection bar to the line that lists the package. You can also mark a group of packages by putting the selection bar on the group's header in the list, but I don't advise you to do this until you understand all about the dependency mechanism as explained below. Selecting a lot of packages at once is very likely to cause a bunch of dependency conflicts between packages at once and this is very confusing, even to the initiated. There are a couple of keybindings to mark a package for installation, I always use "insert", but that doesn't always work when I login remotely over the net, so you might want to check all the possibilities. Just press the "?" key and lookup the keybindings. Assuming you have found the package you want to add to your system, mark it for installation. This will not install it yet, it just tells dselect that you want dpkg to install it in a later phase. One reason to do things this way is to allow the dselect program to check your wishes against package dependencies. Some packages conflict, you can't have them installed at the same time. Others depend, you must have one to install the other. The dpkg engine won't install packages until these dependencies are resolved. This is what dselect is good at, it tries to help you along in resolving the dependencies. When you change a package's status, by marking or unmarking it, dselect will look for dependency issues and if it detects cinflicts, it steps in and presents the (in)famous dependency screen. This is one of the things that has so many people confused, while it is in fact one of the best things since sliced bread. It is (apart from the high standards and strong consistency of the distribution) the big difference between Debian's packaging tools and The Others. What happens when dselect finds a dependency unresolved is that it first shows you an informative message. Read it. Next, you see a sublist of the entire packages list with only those packages that are in some way or another involved in the dependency. Dselect has already suggested a marking for each package involved, but you can still change the suggested markings before you acknowledge the markings with "enter". You can also back out completely and go back to the state your selection was in before you made the change that forced dselect to enter dependency resolution mode. Or you can force dselect to accept an unresolved dependency, but you don't want to do this unless you really know what you're doing and how to handle dpkg at the command line. Lets just assume that you will always either accept dselect's suggestions (maybe slightly modified) or will completely backout the change that caused the dependency conflict. All the keybindings you need are explained in the help screen. So, in order to make you read the documentation, I'll only tell you one key: the "?" one. Supposing you've made all the markings that are necessary for now, just press the "enter" key in the main package list (actually, you can use all the keys, including the backing-out or overriding ones as in the dependency resolution mode) to finish the selection stage. To actually install the packages, choose "Install" and see dselect make dpkg look at all the packages to see if they need to be installed or upgraded from an older version. Most of this needs no user interaction and (depending on the speed of your cdrom) you can get a cup of coffee. Only in the later part of the installation run are packages configured and at that time, some packages will ask you some questions that you have to answer. When this is finished, there are (apart from "Quit") two more items on dselect's main menu: "Configure" and "Remove". The "Configure" command is usually useless, as "Install" most of the time gets things right the first time. It is only in very exceptional cases, where there are very hairy dependency problems, that some packages are installed, but not yet configured. For these cases this menu was created. It will only try to configure what has been left over (dpkg keeps a record of that information) without recursing again through the entire packages tree. The "Remove" command is used when you have marked an installed package for removal or purge (a more drastic form of removal.) If you have only marked a package or two for removal in the selection screen, then you can skip the installation procedure and go straight for the removal command. The last command, "Quit" returns you to the shell. Everything should be dandy and you should logout as root, before you do any unintentional damage to the system. Only in very exceptional cases, like when upgrading 300 packages all at once when there have been major changes in the distribution structure or standards, may you have to actually run both "Install", Configure" and "Remove" commands several consecutive times. You are not likely to end up in a situation like this, but it is a sort of catch-all emergency measure when the normal subtle methods of dselect don't do things right the first time. Cheers, Joost -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
