Written by Tom Wickline

Monday, 14 June 2010 02:25

Something that is difficult to do in Ubuntu (and Linux in general) is installing packages on a system without an active internet connection. This is a brief HOWTO for easily installing packages on an offline Ubuntu system. In order to do this you will need another system (preferably something with Linux) that has an active internet connection as well as a flash drive.

Step 1 - Manually performing an apt-get update
This step is optional if your system was online at some point, however if the system never had an internet connection (or never had apt-get update run) you will need to manually update the packages lists.

To do this goto your system that has an active internet connection, open a terminal and run the following commands in order:

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/main/binary-i386/Release
mv Release archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_lucid_Release

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/main/binary-i386/Packages.bz2
bunzip2 Packages.bz2
mv Packages archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_lucid_main_binary-i386_Packages

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/restricted/binary-i386/Packages.bz2
bunzip2 Packages.bz2
mv Packages archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_lucid_restricted_binary-i386_Packages

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/universe/binary-i386/Packages.bz2
bunzip2 Packages.bz2
mv Packages archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_lucid_universe_binary-i386_Packages

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/multiverse/binary-i386/Packages.bz2
bunzip2 Packages.bz2
mv Packages archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_lucid_multiverse_binary-i386_Packages

This should generate five files for you, copy them to your flash drive. Take the flash drive over to your Ubuntu system that is offline and copy them to

/var/lib/apt/lists

Note, you will need super user privileges to do this. To open a super user file manager on Ubuntu run

sudo nautilus

Step 2 - Generating Package List
On your offline system we now need to generate the list of packages we want to install. For this example I am going to use the wine1.2 and filezilla packages, however it will work for any package(s). On the offline system run the following in terminal

apt-get -qq --print-uris install filezilla wine1.2 > apt_list
awk '{gsub("\x27", "", $0); print $1}' <> apt_list_new

Note you can list as many (or as little) packages as you want to install. Take the apt_list_new file we just generated and copy it to your flash drive.