Question about transfering DVD Package files to /var...

[Tony Yarusso]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 1:06 AM, alfred <alfred.s at nexicom.net> wrote:
>
> Hi All:
>
> I got some DVD Files from www.thelinuxstore.org  for Ubuntu 9.04. Using
> Eric's Find command, which I've now lost. :(  I emptied out all the
> folders, and put all the Packages into one Folder, on the desktop. There
> are now 26,939 .deb packages in one folder. I'd like these to be
> in /var/cache/apt/archives/ just copying them using sudo cp
> -rf /home/name/Desktop/deb-folder/* /var/cache/apt/archives, is too long
> of a list. Is there a better way to do this?

"too long of a list" for what?  Is cp actually throwing an error that
it can't handle such things?  Or are you just running out of disk
space / patience?  First, cp is probably not what you want - no sense
having two copies of all of that stuff.  Either use mv (to just move
everything over and not have them in /home any more), or us ln to make
links to them, either soft or hard depending on what you want to do
with them later.  Half the disk usage, all of the usefulness.

> I'm using Gdebi to do the installs at the moment, which is a bit clunky
> because on the desktop I have to manually search through the 26,939
> items to find the Packages needed for the install. I figure if they were
> in /var.... then I could use Synaptic to do the install. Synaptic tends
> to favour going out on the web to find things and not reading things off
> the DVD's.  With my snail speed Internet I get on good days about 3862
> B/sec so just about all the files are to big to download them, as it
> could take a year and a half to download all the files I need. :(.

Just putting stuff in the apt cache is kind of a clunky way to go
about things, but I guess it will do.  Anything with a newer version
in the repos will still be downloaded of course, which is likely what
you meant by your "Synaptic tends to favour going out on the web"
comment.  A better way of doing this would be to actually set up a
local mirror (with something like apt-mirror) or a caching proxy (like
squid or apt-cacher-ng).

 - Tony Yarusso