Note that the Debian project, as a pragmatic concession to its users, does make
some packages available that do not meet our criteria for being free. These
packages are not part of the official distribution, however, and are only
available from the contrib or non-free areas of
Debian mirrors or on third-party CD-ROMs; see the Debian FAQ, under ``The Debian
FTP archives'', for more information about the layout and contents of the
archives.
For information on how to locate, unpack, and build binaries from Debian source
packages, see the Debian
FAQ, under ``Basics of the Debian Package Management System''.
Technically, it's being mounted at /target; when you reboot into
the system itself, that will become /.
Note that the actual program that installs packages is called
dpkg. However, this package is more of a low-level tool.
apt-get will invoke dpkg as appropriate; it is a
higher-level too, however, because it knows to install other packages which are
required for the package you're trying to install, as well as how to retrieve
the package from your CD, the network, or whereever.
This is due to a bug in base-config which we have fixed for the
next release. We decided not to change this after Potato release, since it was
a rather large change, and too likely to cause problems.