Need (apt and synaptic)

[Nigel Henry]

On Saturday 07 April 2007 19:28, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Nigel Henry <cave.dnb <at> tiscali.fr> writes:
> > You say you have already installed synaptic. I normally install apt first
> > followed by synaptic, but hopefully it will still work ok. Next, check
> > that the fedora repo's are active in /etc/apt/sources.list.d . Do this by
> > typing gedit or kwrite, or whatever text editor you want to use. When it
> > opens, click on filesystem, followed by, (and on the right), "etc",
> > followed by "apt", and lastly "sources.list.d". There are 3 text files
> > there. Just click on the first one, and check that the second line down
> > doesn't have a "#" at the start of it. I think you will find that they
> > are not commented out with a "#". If there is no "#" on the second line,
> > just close the text editor, and we'll now move on.
>
> I'd add to that that you should replace the entries there, which point to
> the master repository (download.fedora.redhat.com), to point to a mirror
> close to you instead. It will bring you faster downloads (especially if
> you're on a fast connection; on dial-up, it probably doesn't matter that
> much), and you avoid swamping the master server even more than it already
> is.

I know I'm on dialup, but where do I find a list of mirrors? As you can see 
I'm in France (Northern France very close to Belgium).
>
> > Apt stores it's downloaded archives in /var/cache/apt/archives, and
> > unlike
>
> Yum
>
> > which as default cleans the archive when it has finished installing
> > updates, apt retains the archive. After a while this can take up
> > significant diskspace, and unless you have a particular reason for saving
> > the archives like I have, you can run the command, as root, on the CLI.
> > apt-get clean.
>
> However, apt-rpm now defaults to removing cached RPMs which are no longer
> in the repository (and thus no longer installable through apt, only by
> running rpm directly on the cache). That option is called
> "APT::Get::Archive-Cleanup".

Now you have reminded me, I have tried that before, but it removed very few 
old no longer installable packages. I do have multiple instances of some FC 
versions, and thought that this would remove all but the latest versions from 
the archives, but no.

This is dialup, so everything is in slo-mo, so I update, for instance FC5, 
then copy the archive to a fat32 formatted data drive. Then I bootup another 
instance of FC5, copy the archive from the fat32 data drive 
to /var/cache/apt, and this saves a lot of dialup download time.

Is there a way to only save the latest package versions in the archive? At the 
moment from time to time I have to work my way manually through the archive 
removing older versions to save a bit of disc space. In most cases, even 
though earlier versions of packages are still available, normally you don't 
need them to be there. The exception might be kernel upgrades, and these I 
keep in a separate directory. Sometimes a later kernel causes problems, and 
it's convenient to be able to reinstall an earlier one, if you've gone and 
trashed it.

This is only an academic Q, as I'm quite happy to work with the machine as is.

Nigel.
>
>         Kevin Kofler