debian installation (dselect and dpkg) woes

[Mike Coleman]

Marvin Bellamy <Marvin.Bellamy at innovision.com> writes:
> Problem now is setting up my
> sources.list file to read from the hard drive.  Assuming I downloaded the CD
> to:
> 
> /dos1/linux/debian/dists/stable/<main|contrib|non-free>
> 
> what should my source be?  I've used:
> 
> deb file:/dos1/linux/debian stable main contrib non-free
> 
> with no success.  I'd hate to install by HTTP or FTP after all that
> downloading to get the packages.

What does "downloaded the CD" mean exactly?  If you have a Debian CD, why not
just install directly from it?

You mention using dselect, so I'm thinking this means you already have a base
system installed and you're just trying to add packages.  Is that right?

The 'file' URI you're using looks reasonable (though I've never tried this
myself).  The problem could be that what's at that URI isn't a well-formed
archive.  Maybe some files are missing or misplaced.  I do seem to recall that
apt doesn't give particularly helpful error messages if sources.list is bogus.

Mike