[plug] Apt upgrading

[smclevie]

Hi all,

I'm working through the Debian setup cd (Woody) and trying to make a long 
list of installation steps for my friend prior to his attempt at installing 
Debian because of the precious lack of such info out there.

I have a little 13G spare drive which I am going through (note the present 
continuous of the verb - to be) in order to get this procedure down pat for 
a newbie.

I have a fairly predictable time all the way except for apt.  (I am running 
a version of apt that hasn't even got man pages setup yet according to the 
man page dated 16 June 1998).  I have tried to update the apt and my apt 
reckons it is the latest available ... which is certainly not the case!!

Q1.  Why is it that I can't get the screen on apt-setup which allows one to 
choose a 'testing' or 'stable' or 'unstable' ??  I have been through it 
over and over doing a variety of command line options as well and CANNOT 
get it to this screen!!  [Is it because my cdrom is THAT old??!!]  [Should 
I use my Lord Sutch version ...???]

At one point I hand edited the sources.list file to try to make it get 
'testing' archives and it still reverted to the 'stable' suite!!!

I have also tried to dpkg -i apt (for a version of apt I had collected on 
previous occasions) with its many dependencies.

It really is an easy package to break also.  Interrupted downloads have 
buggered things up for me... I cannot run through apt-setup without getting 
a 'Failed to fetch ...' message.  It just won't budge away from this 
regardless of alternate mirrors etc.  Am I right to think that apt-setup is 
linked to 'base-config'??  Just why is a brand new install being a bugger?

Another point to note is that one gets a different install if one 'uses 
ppp' -versus- a cdrom install (I don't go through an SSL setup screen for 
instance on the ppp install)

Q2.  When apt is loading the list of packages on initial connection, where 
does it store this file and what is it called?  (I reckon I'll store this 
file so that I don't have to keep going through the hours of downloads for 
each install....)

Any help on these issues is appreciated,

Steve.