Single Install CD ISO :-)

[Hodgins Family]

Good afternoon!

> I am a newbie and Always wanted to do something like
> that. So if get the deb files and burn them to a cd
> (without any extra effort only burn them as datat
> files) then when I insert the cd into the cdrom and
> add the cd to repository I will be able to add
> programs from the cd. Is that right?
> How about having them on a hard drive instead of the
> cd. Can I add a hard drive or folder as one of
> repository too?
> Thanks in advance

Here is what worked for me and mostly answers the question about having them 
on the hard drive:
1) I burned all the deb files from /var/apt/cache on my internet computer to 
a CD-RW
2) took the CD to my offline computer
3) in my /home directory I used mkdir to make my repository....let's name it 
/sarge-repo
4) cd into /sarge-repo and create further subdirectories under it: 
/dists/sarge/main/binary-i386
5) I copied the contents of the CD-RW to 
/sarge-repo/dists/sarge/main/binary-i386
6) then from /sarge-repo, I ran dpkg-scanpackages 
dists/sarge/main/binary-i386  /dev/null  > Packages
7) the file Packages should be in /sarge-repo. So, then run cp Packages 
dists/sarge/main/binary-i386
8) in my sources.list (for me this is in /etc/apt) I added the line deb 
file:///home/rhodgins/sarge-repo/  sarge main
9) apt-get update tells Debian to check out sources.list because there are 
new deb files around
10) apt-get upgrade will upgrade
11) apt-get install will install software from the packages in your /home 
repository

HTH

Rob