Re: Getting dselect and apt-* to work from a local file system

[Tommy McDaniel]

That doesn't seem like to me like what I want to do, but it could be. 
Basically, I downloaded the basic files to install Linux on my Windows 
partition and now want to use dselect to install packages, which will also 
have to be downloaded onto the Windows partition before being transferred 
over manually to the Linux partition. I read 
/usr/share/doc/apt/offline.text.gz, but unfortunately it didn't really solve 
my problem. I don't have another working Linux computer with apt on it to 
download the packages from, nor do I have the program spoken about in the 
second half of the file, even though if I did I would still want to download 
the files manually instead of using that program. I looked for 
/var/lib/apt/lists, but I have no such thing. I think all I had was 
/var/lib, with some stuff in there but no apt. Based on this, how can I 
finish setting up dselect? Everything works (or at least seems to) until I 
get to that error I mentioned in my original posting. I just need to 
download the files onto my Windows partition, transfer them over to the 
appropriate place on the Linux partition (I would assume 
/dists/stable/main/binary-i386/*, or contrib or non-free), and then have 
dselect and apt and dpkg and whatever it is that needs to work properly to 
work properly, while using dselect. I imagine it can be done, I'm just not 
sure what I need to do. Thank you already for your help.

                                          Tommy McDaniel
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