Updates on Two Boxes [Was: Re:Debian Lenny and release dates]

[Christopher Browne]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 10:31 AM, John Moniz <john.moniz-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 03:39:43PM -0400, John Moniz wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> It looks like my drive is getting a bit full. Do I need the packages in
>>> /var/cache/apt/archives in order to do the upgrade? If I clear it, I'm OK,
>>> but not sure if that's where apt does it's look up to determine what needs
>>> upgrading.
>>>
>>
>> You can clean up using 'apt-get clean'.
>>
>> The cache directory is just for storing downloads while installing them,
>> after which you shouldn't need them again.
>>
>> apt-get update will update the list of packages available (and stores
>> them in /var/lib/apt/lists/) and use that list compared to what is
>> installed to decide what to upgrade.
>
> Great info Lennart (Christopher too).
>
> My mother-in-law is still on dial-up and won't be changing anytime soon. I'd
> like to maintain her Ubuntu up-to-date, but it's nearly impossible to
> download the updates at those speeds. I would like to set up the very same
> Ubuntu release at home, then when I update my box, I'd make a copy of the
> new packages on a CD to take to her place once in a while.
>
> I can see that the /var/cache/apt/archives would be the place to copy the
> packages from. Then it would be a matter of figuring out how to get her
> Ubuntu to search the CD for updates, would that be about right? Any
> complications other than trying to get the CD as an apt source?

The main "complication" is that you need to get the packages into her
box's /var/cache/apt/archives directory.

Supposing you mount the CD on /mnt/cdrom, and have the packages in
/mnt/cdrom/archives, then you could do that something like:

for pkg in `(cd /mnt/cdrom/archives; find -name "*.deb")`; do
    ln -s /mnt/cdrom/archives/$pkg /var/cache/apt/archives/$pkg
done

There's a good chance that, by the time you copy the packages over,
there may be a few which have been upgraded further; you'd still need
to pull package lists, and possibly a *few* packages, direct from
Ubuntu archives, but that doesn't strike me as a big problem.  You've
at least got the "heavy lifting" of the 2GB of packages pulled over
via "sneakernet."  :-)
-- 
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"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and
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