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