I finally decided to ditch Kubuntu due to multile problems. I tried Mandriva and was completely floored by the install progress. It offered me the option of using ndiswrapper for my wifi card right during the install and the card came up automatically after the install. Clean interface. But I don't want to start a new learning curve right now. But it's definitely going into a vmware vm soon.
So back to good old debian. First I got the netinst cd and then tried the debain-kde cd. So far so good. It asked for the isl3886 firmware from a new medium but that was that. The wifi card did not work after the install. Not debian's fault because I haven't been able to get the card working with anythng but ndiswrapper.
Even though this was a 'full' cd, the install insisted on downloading a hell of a lot of files (more than 50 or so). Then after the full install was over and I had rebooted and ran apt-update and apt-get upgrade, it wanted to delete almost 40 files using apt-get auto-remove.
If I try to install without using a net mirror, the sources.list is bare except for the cdrom line.
Now I want to install debian on another machine at a different location. Seeing as how I've already dowloaded all these files on one machine, how can I use this to avoid downloading them again for the second install. What are the options available ? 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.
The second machine is at my clinic and I cannot afford to mess with it too much. It's still running kubuntu 8.04 and is not much trouble but I'd rather run one distro on both my main machines.
thank you,
Sharukh.