Offline Software Installation - Download with Windows
In light of T&T policy changes I have moved this tutorial to my blog and will maintain it there. http://cortman.wordpress.com/2012/07...-with-windows/
Thank you for your thread and the work you have done in keeping it current and of use to the community.
It's commonly known how to download programs (and dependencies) for an offline computer with an online machine running Ubuntu, but what if your only access to the internet is through Windows?
You can still do it! I've written a small program in VB.Net that should run on any Windows computer. It takes a user-specified download script and downloads the files just the same as Ubuntu would.
You can download this program on SourceForge here. It's available as a zipped .exe, or you can download the entire source code from the same site and compile it yourself if you prefer.
If you did a fresh installation of 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot or higher, you'll need to install Synaptic on the offline machine first. (For some reason it didn't come bundled with 11.10) This is a little involved but very doable. Here's a link to my tutorial on that procedure.
1. On offline Ubuntu machine: Open a terminal with Control+Alt+t and type
This will open up the Synaptic Package manager. You can browse available software in the column on the far left, or if you know specifically what you're looking for, type it into the search box.Code:synaptic
When you find the software you want to install, right click it and select "Mark for Installation". If a dialog comes up "Mark Additional Required Changes" select Mark. This will ensure that all the packages required for the selected software get installed as well.
2. Once you've picked your software, go to File>Generate Package Download Script. Save the script to its own folder (call the folder "packages") on a USB flash drive or some other portable media. You can name the script whatever you want, but for clarity we'll assume you named it "download".
The Package Download Script is just a little text file that will tell your online computer which packages to download, so you can transfer them to the offline computer.
3. Take the flash drive to your online Windows computer. Download Wassail and extract the .exe program file from the .zip into the same "packages" folder.
NOTE: If when you try to run Wassail it returns an error message saying that the .NET framework is not installed, it's easily fixed. You can download .NET 4.0 for free at http://www.microsoft.com/download/en....aspx?id=17851
4.Double click the Wassail.exe and press the "Select Download Script" button. Find and select your script.
This will download the packages to the "packages" folder. If you open the folder in a file manager you'll see one or more files with the extension .deb. These are the software package files.
Wassail will return a message of "Done!" when it is complete. Be patient! Some package files can be quite large.
5. Copy the "packages" folder containing the .deb files to the /home folder of the offline Ubuntu computer.
6. Open up a terminal on the offline computer and type
You'll be prompted for your administrator password, which will be the same as your user login password. Enter it and Ubuntu will install your software!Code:sudo dpkg -iR packages
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