Adding ISO files to the APT sources file

When it comes to collecting Debian packages into a transportable CD, nothing beats APTonCD for speed and convenience. However, do we always have to burn the the resulting ISO file to CD in order to use it on another machine? Is it possible to work with the ISO file directly? It is!

The first step is to mount the ISO file to a directory.

sudo mount -t iso9660 aptoncd-20081209.iso /home/username/apt -o loop

Then add the file to the repository list, simply modify /etc/apt/sources.list. Add the following line:

deb file:/home/username/apt/ /

From here on, we have access to the transferred packages. They will be available in all APT tools, including Synaptic.