Web based Easy Ubuntu?

[Chizk]

Hi, I am new to Ubuntu and This forum. I have an Idea/Question.

I have just discovered easy ubuntu, but have not had an oportunity to try it yet. However, I do not think It will be of use to me anyway, as I do not have an internet connection at home anyway

Has anyone thought of making a web based package selector (I am sure it would be possible) for ubuntu along the lines of Easy Ubuntu or synaptic? Here is my problem: For various reasons, I do not have an internet connection at home, so my only access to internet is at an internet cafe. These computers are invariably windows based. So, as you can imagine, the only way to get packages onto my computer is to download them individualy (a complex task considering all the dependencies), or download a very large iso, which takes time and subsequent burning to DVD, neither of which are practical at an internet cafe. It would be wonderful to have a web page where you can select the packages that you want and it provides a list of links to the packages and dependencies that you need. You could then download the files that you need, take them home start easy ubuntu or run a script that then installs the packages that you have downloaded. Does anyone know a way to do this currently? Any suggestions about getting packages installed in this fashon? If this does not already exist, it would be a nice feature that I am sure many would use.

Thanks in advance for any help,
Chris.

[az]

There has been talk of adding something like a "download with dependancies" button to the packages.ubuntu.com pages. This would be a community effort and I don't know where to refer you to help out.

It was mentioned at a community council meeting a few weeks ago.

[robotgeek]

Has anyone thought of making a web based package selector (I am sure it would be possible) for ubuntu along the lines of Easy Ubuntu or synaptic? Here is my problem: For various reasons, I do not have an internet connection at home, so my only access to internet is at an internet cafe.

Yes, this has been brought up before as azz said.


These computers are invariably windows based.

That is the tricky part. No access to bash/apt-get system. So, the system would definetly need to be webbased, or run off a ubuntu-live cd (slow)

I have thought about this and maybe I will work on it one of these days. Just too much to do right now.

[Ozitraveller]

Hi, I am new to Ubuntu and This forum. I have an Idea/Question.

I have just discovered easy ubuntu, but have not had an oportunity to try it yet. However, I do not think It will be of use to me anyway, as I do not have an internet connection at home anyway

Has anyone thought of making a web based package selector (I am sure it would be possible) for ubuntu along the lines of Easy Ubuntu or synaptic? Here is my problem: For various reasons, I do not have an internet connection at home, so my only access to internet is at an internet cafe. These computers are invariably windows based. So, as you can imagine, the only way to get packages onto my computer is to download them individualy (a complex task considering all the dependencies), or download a very large iso, which takes time and subsequent burning to DVD, neither of which are practical at an internet cafe. It would be wonderful to have a web page where you can select the packages that you want and it provides a list of links to the packages and dependencies that you need. You could then download the files that you need, take them home start easy ubuntu or run a script that then installs the packages that you have downloaded. Does anyone know a way to do this currently? Any suggestions about getting packages installed in this fashon? If this does not already exist, it would be a nice feature that I am sure many would use.

Thanks in advance for any help,
Chris.

I'm probably re-iterating something that's already been mentioned, but could meta-packages be created to do the tasks that EU does and use Synapthic to download/run them. Maybe there would need to be a separate repo though. Plus all the crypto/signatures too! How difficult is it to make the meta-packages though?

[Chizk]

Well, now that I have a dsl modem, the need for this has vanished, although I did eventually make a hack that got what I wanted. I do not remember explicity as I do not have access to ther steps currently, but I will explain what I did in general terms in the hopes that it will be useful for someone.

First thing I did was download Damn Small Linux (the version that you can run via qemu) My thinking was that since DSL is based on debian, all the apt infrastucture would be in place. I then made another virtual disk via qemu for storage and transfer between my desktop linux and the qemu DSL. I then mounted the virtual disk used by qemu on my desktop linux instalation as a looback filesystem and copied all the apt stuff from my Ubuntu box: the repositories in /etc/apt and the database stuffi in I believe /var/apt (this will make DSL think that it has the same apps installed on it as my desktop instalation ). Then at the cyber cafe, I started up DSL in qemu, made the necessary changes to the apt infrastucture and downloaded the packages I needed. Once I had the files, I remounted the transfer disk at home and transfered the files to my local hard drive for installation. This is quite a complicated process for a beginner to undertake, but it did work for me. I imagine this could work for anyone that is using a debian based system who for whatever reason does not have access to a direct internet connection for their computer and would like to downlad packages with an unmanegable number of dependencies.