Suggestion related to software installation on internetless Ubuntu systems

[Coop]

Hello

Apt is easy to use and all but it requires internet access and what about those people who can't access the internet in Ubuntu?

They have to use Windows to download all the debs and their dependencies and find their dependencies without apt and that is hard for a beginner.

How can we solve this problem?

Well,what I want to suggest is an online Syaptic-like utility.

This will work by the user searching for an application and the online utility will find the application and all its dependencies and let the user download the debs to his/her hard drive.

Then to install the debs we can have an Ubuntu utility which will search the hard drive for the application and its dependencies' debs and install the application.

Has something like this been done before?

What do you think of this suggestion?

Please reply to me.
Regards Coop

[Mulenmar]

An excellent and much-needed idea.

As in, I NEED IT NOW!!!! :lolflag:

[O3.]

yes, thats an important topic.

[Barrucadu]

This would be a brilliant thing. I remember a few years ago trying to get a wireless dongle working on a computer with no eternet port. Find deb, download, try to install, get told that dependicies are needed, and repeat. It didn't help that I only had 30 minutes of Linux experiance at the time, either.

[Ardrias]

What's wrong with http://packages.ubuntu.com ? Granted it's annoying to download each dependent package one by one, but it does work.

[Barrucadu]

What's wrong with http://packages.ubuntu.com ? Granted it's annoying to download each dependent package one by one, but it does work.
That's what I used, however the idea behind this thread is an online package manager - it gets all the dependicies fo you.