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

[Tony Yarusso]

> "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?
>
>
>>The Disk is 320 Gigs, I'm using about 99 Gigs of it, and there are
> about 87 Gigs left for Ubuntu 9.04. So I'm not running out of Disk
> Space. cp is actually throwing out the error, even when there are just
> about 2000 Package Files to Copy or Move over, instead of 26,939, it
> says the list is too long.

Now that's darn interesting.  I had no idea cp had a file number
limit.  (ln and such are still better routes, but just for fun I'd
venture that the only way around this is a shell script to split it
into batches.  Fun!)

> 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).
>
>
>>I've never made use of these Commands before, and My IP
> does not provide Proxy, if it is needed. I'm not even sure what these
> words mean??? Sounds like some sort of Marine Creature to me. :)

I'll see if I can clarify a little to get you started.  apt-mirror is
a (perl, iirc) script that allows you to download EVERYTHING in the
archives to your hard drive, but limited to a particular
release/architecture, unlike the standard rsync-based mirroring
scripts.  ie, you would get all of the files for i386 on karmic.
Useful if you have a fast connection some of the time, but not
normally, such as if you take your machine over to a friend's house to
set up the mirror, then use it while at home.  Using this, nothing is
fetched from the web when you actually install stuff, but it involves
downloading about 30GB of stuff to begin with (and needs updating
occasionally).  Caching is especially handy if you have multiple
computers sharing a connection - it lets you install a program on all
of them while only actually downloading it once.  This would be
something that you set up on one machine and use from all.  In
addition to both of those, had you kept the structure of the DVD
images rather than stripping out the .debs, you could use those as
normal apt sources in Synaptic without any odd fiddling stuff as well.

 - Tony Yarusso