Quote Originally Posted by pau1knopp
I only have a dial up connection at home but have a very fast connection at work. Even doing an apt-get update at home on a new install is very painful over dialup, as it takes about one hour, and this is not even installing software yet.

I want to download (using apt-get) at work on my laptop, then take my laptop home and copy the files I obtained using apt-get to my home PC using the LAN. So far, here is my plan.

After running apt-get update at work, I will copy /etc/apt/sources.list and /var/cache/apt/*.bin from the work machine to the same location on the home machine. At this point, the sources for each should by synchronized, and I am assuming I could do an "apt-get install pine" on the home pc without running "apt-get update" first.

My first question is, does this seem correct so far?

Next I would like to install packages in the same fashion. I want to perform an "apt-get mplayer-i386" at work, and then take the contents of /var/cache/apt/archives to the development pc.

My second question is, what is the best way to install these files after copying them to the home pc? I would imagine that dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/* might work, but it sounds sort of ugly, and I don't know that it would work consistently for my purposes (if at all).

Is there a way to put the files in temp, and let apt-get (or dpkg) know that this is the new location for mplayer-i386?

Thanks in advance,

Paul
It looks like you want something like apt-proxy using your laptop as the proxy for the machines on your home LAN. The description of the package:
apt-proxy automatically builds a Debian HTTP mirror based
on requests which pass through the proxy. It's great for
multiple Debian machines on the same network with a slower
internet link.

The archive is automatically kept up to date using http,
ftp or rsync. Cache cleaning of unused and old versions
is configurable. You can also import the contents of
your apt cache into the archive using apt-proxy-import.

For more information, see the apt-proxy homepage at
http://apt-proxy.sourceforge.net