Arch Linux

potterzot

Member

Registered: 2008-05-21

Posts: 9

Getting packages without pacman

Hi there, I have a somewhat peculiar situation, in that I often have access to internet, but it is through windows boxes, and so I obviously cannot use pacman to update my laptop, which is only rarely able to connect to the internet.

It seems like I should be able to download and mount the .iso, but I run into problems with the squashfs file system and the like.  Any ideas for how I can download updates on windows (to be transferred and installed afterward)?

dannytatom

Member

From: Seattle, WA

Registered: 2009-02-02

Posts: 229

Website

Re: Getting packages without pacman

Keep a list of your installed packages and check the rss feed for updates, if there are any relevant ones, download the .pkg.tar.gz.

---

dnyy in IRC & Urban Terror

Garns

Member

Registered: 2008-05-28

Posts: 239

Re: Getting packages without pacman

If you want to do full updates do the following:

First download new package dbs and get them to your laptop as described in Arch Wiki - Offline Installation of Packages.

Then run pacman -Sup and save the resulting list to a flashdrive or something.

Next time you get access to a computer with internet connection (shouldn't be to much time in between or the db could be out of date) download the packages from the urls on your list. Not sure what tool you should use in windows to do this, maybe curl or free download manager or something else .

Back at your Laptop copy the packages into your pacman cache (/var/cache/pacman/pkg) and run pacman -Su to install them.

Now this is rather tedious, if you really don't get any internet access with your laptop you might want to think about using a distribution which isn't rolling release and which features DVD(s) with a gazillion of packages. Of course, if you want to stay with Arch go ahead.

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: Getting packages without pacman

When you're laptop has net access, run pacman with the -p flag to get the URLs of updated packages. Download them on the Windows box, copy them into your laptop's package cache, and update.

narada

Member

Registered: 2009-07-12

Posts: 34

Re: Getting packages without pacman

For clarity's sake, do you wish to have an equivalent of pacman -Syu while in Windows or do you wish to know how to install a package (that you've already downloaded using Windows) without using pacman -S? If the former I think you may be SOL unless you go with dannytatom's suggestion. If the latter you can do as danny said and download the package using Windows, then install it in Arch using pacman -U /path/to/package.pkg.tar.gz.

-edit-
The link Garnz provided looks good as well.

Last edited by narada (2009-07-17 10:58:36)

potterzot

Member

Registered: 2008-05-21

Posts: 9

Re: Getting packages without pacman

Thanks.  Its not that I can't access internet with my laptop, its that I am in Africa and the only access I have is windows machines, so all updates have to be downloaded on windows before I can copy them over to my laptop and then update them in the normal offline way.  Yeah, I guess downloading them manually is my only option.