[GLLUG] Ubuntu Packages

[Adam Jensen]

Marr wrote:
> Sadly, I'm stuck with a dial-up connection -- no DSL or cable modem 
> availability where I'm at. Even worse, I've been unable to consistently 
> (especially at any sort of normal modem speeds) get the internal modem on 
> that laptop with Ubuntu to work. It's quite maddening. I guess I should hook 
> up an external RS-232 modem and an RS-232/USB adapter and try that sometime 
> to update my Ubuntu installation.

You mentioned before that you installed from CD.  If you still have that 
disc available, Ubuntu should be able to install the packages included 
in the "build-essential" meta-package from that disc.  It should already 
be set up to do so since it was your installation medium.

> Is there some way to use another PC (e.g. the one at a relative's house with 
> DSL) to just download an Ubuntu package (i.e. without installing) and then 
> transfer that to the Ubuntu PC for installation? I suppose I should be 
> looking into 'apt-get', which I've never really used, despite many years of 
> GNU/Linux use. I'm just not familiar with the 'apt' system and every 
> reference to using it seems to always blithely assume that the machine on 
> which you want to install has a broadband connection.

The individual .deb files can be downloaded and installed manually using 
"sudo dpkg --install <package.deb>".  There aren't too many dependencies 
for build-essential, so it might be an option:

$ sudo apt-cache depends build-essential
build-essential
  |Depends: libc6-dev
   Depends: <libc-dev>
     libc6-dev
   Depends: gcc
   Depends: g++
   Depends: make
   Depends: dpkg-dev

(From an Ubuntu 7.10 system)

These packages do have some dependencies of their own; you might have to 
follow the buck as it gets passed around.

> On a related issue/question, I can simply Google for a package to see how big 
> it is. For example:
> 
>    http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/build-essential
> 
> shows that this package is 6.8KB (i.e. modem-friendly!). But, just out of 
> curiosity, is there any easy, generic way to see how big a package is 
> using 'apt' (while connected to the Internet, obviously), i.e. before 
> attempting to download/install over a modem connection? I'd RTFM, but there's 
> no 'M' to 'R' on my Slackware installation! ;^)

When you run "sudo apt-get install X" online or offline, where X 
involves multiple packages, you should get a summary that shows the 
number of packages to be installed, their total size, etc, and it will 
ask you for confirmation before it fetches the files.

HTH.  Have fun!

Adam