On Friday 29 Aug 2003 5:40 pm, Trey Gruel wrote:
I'm sure there are more knowledgable people who will correct me if i'm wrong, but here goes..
I have a lot of packages in my /var/cache/apt/archives folder. I would like APT to install them all on a new SuSE installation on another hard drive rather than downloading them all again. So I burnt them on to a CD.
I then copied them on to the new hard drive, keeping the same path. However, I can't get APT on the new hard drive to install them. If I reselect all these packages with Synaptic, it wants to download them all again, not look in the folder.
How can I get APT to look in the folder and just install them from there? I have tried "rpm --rebuilddb" but that hasn't solved it.
If you've already got the rpms downloaded, then why are you bothering to use apt to install them? Why not just "rpm -Uvh *.rpm" in that dir? APT is just a front end to RPM/DEB to help with downloading and satisfying dependencies. Since it was APT that downloaded them, I would assume that all of the new packages they depend on are also in that dir.
An associated question:
Does APT make a log of what it downloads? I think it must do. For example, if 8 packages are marked in Synaptic for downloading and the download is interrupted after only a few have been downloaded, if these same 8 packages are later marked again for the download to be resumed, those already downloaded are skipped, but they are all installed. I can't find where it logs what it is doing.
I'm pretty sure that what is happening is that it is either doing some sort of checksum or comparing the filesize/timestamp, declaring them to be the same file, and going on to the next selected package. NcFTP does the same thing (filesize/timestamp) when doing downloads if there is a file of the same name in the destination directory..
-- trey
Thanks for the reply and information, Trey, and apologies for this delay in answering. I tried "rpm -Uvh *.rpm", but got some dependancy problems, which I hadn't got using Synaptic on the first download. So, rather than solving them I decided to try to get APT to install from the hard drive. I assumed that the version number and datestamp of the files on the hard drive was the same as the ones on the APT repository, but didn't check. Perhaps they weren't. Cheers Keith