How do I make Hardy recognize a CD of deb files?

[SunKing2]

I'm using Hardy Heron. I'd like to keep using it. I mean forever.

I have several old PCs, and in the past few years I've installed 8.04 several times. Every time I install, it downloads about 184 updates... a slow process.

I would like to put all the .deb files on a CD (or flash drive) so that future installs won't need to download these updates.

Question 1: How do I get a newly installed version of Hardy Heron to recognize that there are files on the CD, and so use them rather than downloading the files. I think that maybe just copying the files to /var/cache/apt/archive might work. Is this true?

Question 2: I once loved version 7 of Ubuntu like I love 8.04 now. But when I try to install it, it won't update anything anymore and it seems unable to find any additional software for version 7. Now I've abandoned version 7, but is there a way to download hundreds of deb files for Hardy Heron, save them to a CD, to ensure that I can continue to use Hardy Heron in say, the year 2012, and have access to all of its non-standard packages, and still be able to install other packages which are located on CD?

[oldos2er]

If you have *deb files on a cd, you can install them with either dpkg or gdebi. For example
sudo dpkg -i /media/cdrom/*deb

Or, when the cd is mounted, double-click on a *deb, and gdebi will open and allow you to install it.

[amac777]

All the old releases of Ubuntu are still available here:

http://old-releases.ubuntu.com

To use them, you need to update your apt sources (/etc/apt/sources.list) file to point to that url instead of whatever mirror you were using.

[oupamster]

just to add on, how about using Apt-on-CD?