Arch Linux

anarki

Member

Registered: 2005-12-24

Posts: 8

Installing packages

I really wanna install Arch on my PC, but I have slow dial-up at home. However, I can use really fast internet connection in my school to download packages.

So, this is what I wat to do: Install Arch form install-CD, download all the packages form ftp://mi.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/archlin … a/os/i686/ , burn it to CDs and use that CDs to add software on my home PC.
Is this possible? How could I do this? Will pacman resolve the dependencies and install packages correctly?

tnx.

btw: Sorry about my english :cry:

arooaroo

Member

From: London, UK

Registered: 2005-01-13

Posts: 1,268

Website

Re: Installing packages

Anarki,

It is inconvenient to have a slow net connection, but it's certainly possible with the way you say, as I've done it before in the past.

Pacman is fairly handy here though. From the man page:

-p, --print-uris
    Print out URIs for each specified package and its dependencies. These can be piped to a file and downloaded at a later time, using a program like wget.

So, say you wanted to install kde, you could do 'pacman -Sp kde' and it would print all the URLs for all the package files you need. I would redirect this to a file and then use wget to grab them all

pacman -Sp kde > kde_files.txt

Copy kde_files.txt to uni, then run

wget -i kde_files.txt

and then burn all the files to disk, or copy to usb drive, etc.

The advantage of using pacman is that it will print all the dependencies that you required package needs. This is much more preferable than browsing a package list on a mirror ftp site and downloading the packages that you "think" are required, only to find out later at home that you missed a couple by accident!

---

arooaroo | Jacman (Pacman GUI) | Getting to Grips with LaTeX | flickr

deficite

Member

From: Augusta, GA

Registered: 2005-06-02

Posts: 693

Re: Installing packages

I didn't even know pacman could do that. Very good tip!