On 02/12/2023 04:22, Greg Wooledge wrote:
On Fri, Dec 01, 2023 at 10:01:54PM -0600, David Wright wrote:On Fri 01 Dec 2023 at 21:55:42 (-0500), Greg Wooledge wrote:apt install ./myfile.debThat requires you to be online, aka "exposed mode". The OP only exposes a live USB to the outside world, not their "real" system. I dimly recollect something called apt-move, but I never needed to use it. Back in the days of dial-up, when I had a real job, I would upgrade my desk's tower, copy the (uncleaned) archives/ directory onto a Zip drive, take it home and install the .debs onto my home desktop, configured identically, with dpkg.In that case, use apt-get instead of apt. That way the downloaded .deb files will not be removed afterward. Then you can just sweep 'em up from /var/cache/apt/archives, copy them to a stack of floppies, put the floppies in a box, tie the box to a trained ferret, send the ferret across town....
apt-get has the side effect of installing the packages on the connected system. There used to be "apt-zip" (no longer in Debian), which was built around the idea of using ZIP disks for transferring files. "apt-zip-list" would use the state of packages on the disconnected system to product a "want list" of files to be downloaded. This "want list" would be a shell script consisting of various wget or curl commands. The script would be taken over to the connected system and run, to pull the required packages onto a high-capacity removable medium (such as a USB drive or ZIP drive). Back at the disconnected system, "apt-zip-inst" would complete the process, installing the files from the removable medium.
The nice thing about "apt-zip" was that it took the guesswork out of the equation. The files required were the ones that the target system required, no more no less. Also, the connected system didn't have to be debian; there was an option to write the script in a DOS-compatible manner, so you could run it on Windows, for example.
I don't know if there's a direct replacement for apt-zip nowadays.
There are still use cases for fully disconnected systems these days. The most common one might be an offline Certificate Authority (best practice says that the host holding your certificate authority certificate should NEVER have network access, to prevent any possibility of compromise), but some security professionals prescribe "air-gap" security for other systems (think of the Iranian Uranium Enrichment system that Stuxnet compromised). For these sorts of systems, you're stuck with using something like apt-zip, or else just downloading the point-release ISOs and burning them.If the OP doesn't have a same-release, same-architecture connected system to use for this purpose, then I don't have an answer. I don't deal with this stone-age crap any longer, and I am unable to express how *happy* I am that this is the case.
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