2009/5/23 Chris Bannister
<mockingbird@earthlight.co.nz>
On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 01:51:45PM +0200, Raffaele Morelli wrote:
> Hi you all,
>
> I have 3 debian boxes (two i386 and one amd64) which are not connected to
> the network so I usually do upgrades by downloading weekly generated dvd iso
> images, burning images to a dvd-rw and running apt-cdrom add && apt-upgrade.
>
> My question is: can I fool apt in order to avoid burning dvd-rw each week?
>
> I am not lazy but I do this regularly and burning two dvd-iso for different
> archs sometimes makes me crazy because of errors, dvd's failures or data
> corruption.
>
> Any suggestion is appreciated.
I too am interested in this. If there was some way to simulate an
"apt-get update" by downloading the Packages.gz file and putting that on
the non-networked machine and doing the magic to that file the same way
that "apt-get update" does on a networked machine.
Then all you need to do is:
1. apt-get dist-upgrade
2. answer no.
3. take note of the packages it wants to download.
4. Download the packages from a network machine
+ go to packages.debian.org/<package-name>
+ download .deb + put on USB stick.
5. Put downloaded packages into /var/cache/apt/archives/
of non-networked machine
6. Run "apt-get dist-upgrade"
When it says "Need to get 0MB/XXXMB of archives."
- answer yes.
This is what I usually do on a machine connected to the network by a 56k modem.
I only do
apt-get update
then
apt-get --print-uris upgrade give me a txt file with the necessary info
about upgradable packages (only a one line cmd is needed to get a
usable and wget-able file).
It will now dist-upgrade normally
Have a look at apt-zip for steps 1-6.
It seems to be non-trivial to simulate an "apt-get update" :(
This doesn't work: :(
I wonder if you can copy:
/var/lib/apt/lists/debian.attica.net.nz_debian_dists_lenny_contrib_binary-i386_Packages
[..]
/var/lib/apt/lists/www.debian-multimedia.org_dists_lenny_main_binary-i386_Packages
from a networked machine to a non-networked machine?
this is hard (for me at least) to do but I will try something this week end.
cheers
-r