As mentioned elsewhere I have been playing with Ubuntu Server 8.10 and this has resulted in numerous installation attempts as I tried to get a repeatable build. The first couple of times I installed the server from scratch, I downloaded all the updates. Pretty quickly I thought this was a waste of time and I wondered if I could save those updates to a CD.
The solution was in the ‘apt-move’ command. I am not going to claim to fully understand what I did but the instructions found in the ubuntu documentation seemed to work with one caveat. The documentation refers to dapper. All occasions were replaced by intrepid without obvious complications.
When I ran the next install I loaded the CD on to they system which significantly decreased the time to do the updates and reduced the data downloaded. It also seemed to pick up any other packages (such as Virtualbox) that I had downloaded though I seemed to need to add in the CD archive on each occasion I used aptitude.
The other problem I had was in creating a GPG key for ‘root’.
The most useful tip was how to become sudo (root) permanently.
sudo -s -H