Posted January 12, 2015
ssokolow: It's easier than on Windows.
1. Open up Synaptic Package Manager and select everything you want to install or update (as you normally would).
2. Instead of clicking Apply, stick in a thumbdrive and choose "Generate Package Download Script".
3. Go to another machine with Internet access and run the script. (The script is simple enough that you can use it on Windows too if you rename it to .bat, and put a copy of wget.exe next to the script or in your %PATH%)
4. Bring the thumbdrive back to your offline machine, make sure the same packages are still selected (they will be if you didn't quit Synaptic), and choose "Add downloaded packages".
All your updates plus any programs you want to install in one simple, automated process.
Off the top of my head, I don't remember the process for offline-updating the list of available packages, but it's equally simple.
shaddim: Well, I'm pro-open source myself...but this part of the linux ecosystem is severely broken (and the design mistakes infact have nothing to do with being open source but with legacy unix baggage/thinking, which needs to go away). 1. Open up Synaptic Package Manager and select everything you want to install or update (as you normally would).
2. Instead of clicking Apply, stick in a thumbdrive and choose "Generate Package Download Script".
3. Go to another machine with Internet access and run the script. (The script is simple enough that you can use it on Windows too if you rename it to .bat, and put a copy of wget.exe next to the script or in your %PATH%)
4. Bring the thumbdrive back to your offline machine, make sure the same packages are still selected (they will be if you didn't quit Synaptic), and choose "Add downloaded packages".
All your updates plus any programs you want to install in one simple, automated process.
Off the top of my head, I don't remember the process for offline-updating the list of available packages, but it's equally simple.
You described the (non-obvious) process of getting something from an central repository to run it later locally. The distro centered approach with centralized repositories (while being fragmented among the distros) has several downsides: only what is in the repos is available & recommended to users, meaning limited amount of apps. As in the distro concept with the approach every lib is a system lib and therefore tight intercoupling of apps with system, only the complete system with apps is updated, meaning either out-of-dateness of applications or instability. As it is assume everything is updated and synchronized with the distro, stable API/ABIs, forming a stable platform identified as crucial long ago, across multiple distros never were developed or enforced for the linux ecosystem, so we can't provide stable interfaces to external app developers and therefore suffering on a severe lack of ISV apps (Photoshop, Adobe stuff, games) (see also the compatibility problems of external binary apps for steam for linux).