Dear all,
I would like to ask your help on how I can install packages for the latest opensuse 12.3 from my work computer that I can install later on on my home computer that has no internet connection.
Is it possible to download kile package and with the help of a usb stick copy it to the other computer?
Regards
Alex
On 2013-04-04 11:46, alaios wrote:
>
> Dear all,
> I would like to ask your help on how I can install packages for the
> latest opensuse 12.3 from my work computer that I can install later on
> on my home computer that has no internet connection.
There is no known way to produce a list of needed packages with
dependencies for use on an off-line computer.
The only method I know is to clone the entire repository into an
external disk. And they are huge, even only considering oss, non-oss,
and updates.
In theory it is possible to download the repository metadata; knowing
where those files are stored, you copy them to your off-line computer,
on which you have to configure all repositories to never refresh and
keep downloaded packages. Then you open there the package manager and
ask it to install whatever you want, stop, and then hand-copy the list
of packages it wants to install.
At that moment you have to go the online machine, download all that, and
copy them to the directories where the off-line computer looks for them
(under “/var/cache/zypp/packages/” if repos are configured to keep
downloaded packages). Then you can tell it to continue the installation.
I don’t know if anybody has attempted this procedure.
> Is it possible to download kile package and with the help of a usb
> stick copy it to the other computer?
Yes, if you also download all dependencies it needs.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
Put the DVD iso on your computer, use the repo manager to add the iso as a repo. That would already give you a good base to start from. Kile might even be on it.
The next one, is to create an “Install” folder on your system. Add that folder too through the repo manager, add, local folder, browse and select the Install folder, check “rpm-dir” checkbox, done.
Now transfer downloaded packages + their dependencies into your Install folder. Run “zypper ref”, the downloaded packages will be installable through Yast.
You can install kile at work and then check the “history” in YaST and find the packages that are requires
Download the relevant rpms from download.opensuse.org or through software.opensuse.org
Take them on flash drive. copy onto system and do
zypper in abc.rpm cde.rpm fgh.rpm...
Yes you can. I do this all the time!
I need to do this at home because I am on usage based billing (UBB) that only allows so much bandwidth before I start getting charged.
You can copy the rpm files to a USB and then copy those onto the target machine.
But you need to configure zypper to do this first!
Example:
Say I have a fresh new machine that I just installed openSUSE on that doesn’t have any updates (because during the initial install I told it not to automatically update). Now I need to go get updates.
But before I do my first update/patch I need to tell zypper to cache the packages that it is going to download.
I’m more familiar with the command line so I’ll explain how this happens there.
Open up a terminal.
Type
zypper lr
That should output a list of your repositories and some status info.
You should enable caching on the repos that have the Enabled flag set to “yes” - you can see this near the right of the output of the above command.
Instead of typing in the full repo name, you can use the repo number on the far left or the alias for this.
The base repos that should have caching turned on are: openSUSE-12.2-Oss, openSUSE-12.2-Non-Oss, openSUSE-12.2-Update, openSUSE-12.2-Update-Non-Oss
Those four repos in my zypper lr list are numbers 11, 12, 15, and 16. They will definitely be different for yours so change as needed!
Also include any other repos you want cached besides just the base openSUSE ones (basically any repos with *yes *under Enabled)
So I could then issue the zypper command, as root:
su -
zypper mr -k 11 12 15 16
The -k flag tells zypper to modify repos (mr) and store the files on disk when they are downloaded instead of temporarily.
You can see more info from issuing:
zypper help mr
So now when I run
zypper patch
or
zypper up
all the files it downloads are saved in the /var/cache/zypp/packages folder.
So this step has to happen on the machine that is connected to the internet - or what I call the “hot machine” because it’s the only one with internet access or allowed to download packages for openSUSE.
I like to take that **packages **folder and place it into a tar file so that the user permissions are kept and not lost when copying directly to a USB that might not be formatted in ext4 or whatever.
So to tar them, as the root user if you aren’t already:
su -
tar cvpf /mnt/pathtousb/packages.tar /var/cache/zypp/packages
The above is done as the root user because the files in the packages folder are owned by the user and group root.
Now on the cold machine (one that can’t download openSUSE updates/patches) extract the tar file to the /var/cache/zypp folder and tell it to extract only files that don’t already exist there:
su -
tar xkvf packages.tar /var/cache/zypp/
Then once those are copied, you can run *zypper patch *or zypper up and it won’t re-download any files it doesn’t have to.
This works well on machines with identical setups (ie, same software) and architecture (ie, 64bit to 64bit).
Later on you may want to do this again so just plug that usb with the packages.tar file into the hot machine and run a zypper patch or zypper up again to let it download and install the latest packages.
But the tar command has a slight difference, you can simply update the tar file:
su -
tar upvf /mnt/pathtousb/packages.tar /var/cache/zypp/packages
And that *should *grab only the new rpms.
Now it’s safe, on even the hot machine to remove those old files if you find they are starting to eat up disk space with a zypper clean. Type zypper help clean for more options there.
That’s about it, I know it’s a long write up, but it’s a short procedure once you get use to it.
One thing I also do at home is share that packages folder directly over the LAN via Samba or NFS then let the other machines mount it to their systems or configure the zypper configuration directly to change the default packages path to the network path. This way no tar’ing or copying from and to the usb is needed at all.