[Comm-en] What to do when apt-get connection fails mid-way?

[Richard Hainsworth]

To get one package (XFree86-devel) using apt-get, I had to download 10
packages and an rpm. Since the connection was slow, I left my computer
on overnight. In the morning, I discovered a time-out failure mid-way
through the LAST package.

I tried "apt-get install XFree86-devel --fix-missing" as suggested in
the failure message. But it seemed all the packages had to download
again.

In the future, how should I re-start the apt-get process so that
downloaded packages are not downloaded again?

Richard