On Thursday 19 Mar 2009, Dr. Sharukh K. R. Pavri. wrote:
What I was thinking is install without a net mirror, and then copy over the sources.list and the contents of /var/cache/apt/archives to the new machine and then run apt-get update and upgrade.
Afaik that wont work. update /upgrade needs the packages.gz file from the locations listed in /etc/apt/sources.list
But you can do a dpkg -iR /var/cache/apt/*.deb WARNING: its R (recursive) not r (= remove).
I just upgraded etch to lenny with the 5 downloaded dvd iso. upgrade bombed out with "libc6 does not belong to dpkg" (or some such error). libc6 and stuff reside in /lib/tls/. I had to move that out and proceed. I had to manually add kde* and strangely xserver-xorg-input-kbd and xserver-xorg-input-mouse when x started without kb and mouse. The iceweasel / ff/ whatever is a pain as far as bookmarks. They disappeared. And after some digging around managed to get it back.
So whats great in lenny?. Well nothing. Everything is just the same so far. Everything worked earlier anyway. Except mapnik and osm. All the gis tools seem to have loaded nicely. Will give them a check in a few days.