Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, Day Brown wrote:

> > > Debian seemed to have a really good idea with apt-get, but
> > > now I find their servers are down,
> >
> > Still down, are they?
> yes, apparently taken out with malice aforethought, perhaps motivated by
> the profits out outfits like Microsoft which are threatened.
>
> > > so it is totally useless.
> >
> > You give up too easily.  Surely there are Debian mirrors that
> > are still functioning.
> I'd be grateful for a link. I did get a note from their newslist today,
> that some servers are back online, and that they expect to have the
> problem solved soon. But as you might see, I have other distros to use
> in the meantime.
>
Start here: http://www.debian.org/mirror/mirrors_full .  For a list of
alternate apt sites (packages provided by interested parties but not
necessarily included in the main distribution) look at
http://www.apt-get.org .  I'd say you could use a tutorial on apt-get as
well.  Take a look at:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/index.en.html#contents .
Btw, I think the thing that's "down" that you keep referencing is simply a
page that lists which packages are available.  apt-get doesn't use that
page:  that's just for people to view so they can see if a package they
want is available, or maybe someone who wants to install Debian also wants
to know what's included.  If you have apt on your system you don't even
need that page: you just issue "apt-cache search nameofprog" from the
command line and all relevant results will be returned from the apt
database.

James