Yesterday was a horrendous day! My goal was to upgrade my ancient sarge distribution to etch, using my three etch DVDs. It is a complicated problem because my DVD Reader/player is external, connected through USB, and my BIOS won't allow booting from it.
Because of foolish mistakes of mine(don't ask!) it turned out I had to trash my / and /boot partitions, and completely reinstall sarge, from my ancient and well-used pile of 12 sarge CDs. This took a while<ggrrr>. I then ran apt-cdrom -d /media/dvd add. (Remark: I had of course made sure that /media/dvd had been created and that I could mount a DVD on that mount point. And I guess it is important to note that this was all kosherly<g> entered in my /etc/fstab) After some incantations of " . . . upgrade" -- doesn't seem ever to hurt -- I followed the absolutely inspirational advice of Florian Kulzer, and made a file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/apt.conf, with the one line: Acquire::cdrom::mount "/media/dvd"; (for safety's sake, following a tidbit in the Release Documentation, I put a symlink to that in /etc/apt/ . >From then, paying careful attention to warnings, and of course being thoroughly backed up, the process of running apt-get dist-upgrade (maybe I used aptitude, already I've suppressed the details of yesterday<g>) was fairly routine. I'm writing this a) as a Shout of Triumph(Yes, debian, if one labors hard enough, Does Work), and b) as a note of thanks and public acknowledgement to Florian Kulzer. Best wishes to all, Alan, a certified Etcher -- Alan McConnell : http://patriot.net/users/alan "The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Impeachment proceedings should be started immediately. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]