Debian confsion - pcmcia services dropped off when doing a dselect operation!

Hi there, can anyone clear a problem I have.

I'm using Debian to power an old Dell XPi pentium and it's be quite reasonable until today when I carelessly removed the pcmcia-cs package and am now without a network.

Is there a way of puttin the files on a floppy and installing them in a similar way to that of the "rpm -i [package]" concept?

I don't really want to make install as it would probably get real messy (based entirely on personal experience.) and I feel sure that simply downloading a package that already works would be the best course of action.

Sorry to ask a dumb Q. I shouldn't be at jobs like this so late at night,

(If I can learn that lesson before my grave, I'll be doing well.)

I have not messed with Debian in a while, but get the correct package to the home directory in your Debian installation, move to that directory in console mode as root user and type;

dpkg -i <package name>

There may be an issue with dependencies, depending how you removed the package. How did you remove the package? What command(s) did you use?

just type:
apt-get install <package name>
and all dependencies would be installed if you say yes.

namandar

Thanks Danleff,

Spot on, I didn't realise that dpkg was able to do such things but I was hoping that such a tool was available.

The dependacies were not an issue because I had removed something that deselected pcmcia-cs as a dependancy. I've been using dselect mostly - to pick and choose packages and then it's very easy to remove any unwanted packages and update existing ones. I tend to use apt-get to install single packages because Dselect has got a little confusing since I requested a system-wide update and now tries to install more packages than there are room for. Untill I get that sorted out, I'll just continue using it to remove packages that take up space - more carefully in future.

It was great to copy the file across (on a floppy,) type the command you described and straight-away afterwards do a sucessfull ping out.

Thanks again.

Jon

and, if you enable the bash completition, you can search package names via TAB TAB just like this:

fr34k:~# apt-get install libncu[TAB TAB]

libncurses4 libncurses5-dbg libncurses-dev libncurses-ruby1.8 libncursesw5-dbg
libncurses5 libncurses5-dev libncurses-ruby libncursesw5 libncursesw5-dev
fr34k:~# apt-get install libncurses

like command completition

Yep, I thought about apt-get, but I was not sure about if pc-janitor did an original network installation, or had the full disk set, or what his apt sources were.

I did not know about the tab completion, so that's a tip for me!

If pc-janitor is on a dual boot system and has PartitionMagic, it looks like it's time to enlarge his Linux partition...steal more space from Windows! :p

Funny you mention the autocomplete, I tried initially to install the card services by typing "dpkg -i pcmcia-cs" yet when I eventually "dpkg -i pcmcia-cs<TAB>" the file I really needed to reference (complete with versioning numbers) popped straight up. What was I thinking!

I do use apt-get, but I didn't get very far with that as I had no network connection. Does Apt work the same way as dpkg does if the package is in the directory you working from?

I'm Linux only. My desktop uses Fedora Core 3 and the Debian installation was the simplest thing for me to get working with a floppy and pcmcia setup on my brother's old Laptop.

However My wife wants our son to uses Dorling Kindersley CD's and I'm feeling the pressure to go out and buy a copy of what I've avoided for so long:-(.

Harsh really, Maisy loved scanning her photos with XP and she's never been as happy with the Gimp.

I'm open to alternatives for the Dorling Kindersly "we need your computer to have a perfectly set up quicktime and directX setup before we'll teach your children the important stuff about life." poser.

Thanks for your help guys. (oh and that's not a new thread, it's just a by the way - I'll do a search for threads that answer it before I shell out for a move away from my bash:-o)

Apt-get works if you have sources in the /etc/apt/sources.lst file. If you did a network install from floppy, then the source list is via the net. You need a network connection to access the packages.

If you installed from cdrom disks, then the apt sources include the cdrom disks.

dpkg is local, so you need to have the package(s) that you want to install on the system locally.

apt-get resolves any deprendent packages that may also be needed without you worrying about them and resolve any deprendent packages that may be needed. In your case, you were lucky that only the single package was needed, as pcmcia was working originally.

You may want to try Synaptic to install new packages, which has a nice gui interface. Now that you have a working internet connection, just type as root user in a console;

apt-get install synaptic and it should be installed.

Using Synaptic, you can see what any dependency packages are and take control of the process much easier.