Package transfer between machines

[pastorblue]

I am a Linux newbie  at a school in Zambia. We have recently put Ubuntu on our desktop machines but I purchased a copy of VL 6 De Luxe and it proved by far the best for some older laptops we had donated to us. Here's my problem - we can update one Ubuntu machine and then transfer all the update files to the other machines quite easily. We have to do that because Internet access here is very slow and expensive. On VL I want to put all the additional packages and updates onto a CD (or USB memory) and transfer to other machines. I have found the packages (/home/ftp etc etc) but the packages folder contains lots of hidden files which always refuse to copy over, even as root and with cp -f command. Do I need those hidden files, and if so, how do I copy them? Any help appreciated.

Pastorblue

[kc1di]

I am a Linux newbie  at a school in Zambia. We have recently put Ubuntu on our desktop machines but I purchased a copy of VL 6 De Luxe and it proved by far the best for some older laptops we had donated to us. Here's my problem - we can update one Ubuntu machine and then transfer all the update files to the other machines quite easily. We have to do that because Internet access here is very slow and expensive. On VL I want to put all the additional packages and updates onto a CD (or USB memory) and transfer to other machines. I have found the packages (/home/ftp etc etc) but the packages folder contains lots of hidden files which always refuse to copy over, even as root and with cp -f command. Do I need those hidden files, and if so, how do I copy them? Any help appreciated.

Pastorblue

Greeting Pastorblue,
Welcome to Vector Linux.
I may not quite understand what you are trying to do. But you can not easily use Ubuntu files on a Vector linux machine. so transferring those ubuntu programs will not work on Vector linux laptops. If it is just a matter of text files and such that would be no big problem.  You will be better off installing either Ubuntu or Vector on all the machine. IMHO. Ubuntu uses a different packaging system that Vector so the packages are not directly compatible, that's not to say you can't convert them but then you may run into dependency problems.

Hope this helps let us know how it's going and we'll try to give you all the help we can.

Dave
 

[kidd]

Welcome to VL pastorblue.

@kc1di:  I think he wants to download vectorlinux packages once, and transfer them to other vl computers, without having to download again from internet.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to do it . I'd try to cp -r /home/ftp to another computer, and try to slapt-get a given package, maybe, slapt-get will reuse the packages in /home/ftp.

If a package has no dependencies, you can just installpkg /path/to/name_of_package.tlz , and it will install.   If it has dependencies, you should install them manually too (a bit tedious).

We'll have to wait for more experienced vl users to come with a safe solution...

Cya

[nightflier]

Good thinking, using one machine to download updates and re-using the cached files.

I have not tried this approach, but as far as the copy operation, I just tried copying the whole /home/ftp directory on my machine. Using the root account and Midnight Commander (mc), everything copied over, including hidden files.

[kc1di]

Welcome to VL pastorblue.

@kc1di:  I think he wants to download vectorlinux packages once, and transfer them to other vl computers, without having to download again from internet.

I Hadn't thought of that thanks for the clearing that up kidd.
Dave 

[pastorblue]

Welcome to VL pastorblue.

@kc1di:  I think he wants to download vectorlinux packages once, and transfer them to other vl computers, without having to download again from internet.

Thanks kidd, you have it right. It's really good to have all this help so quickly, I appreciate it.

[StrayBit]

I just updated my system and noticed that gslapt has a box to download only.  Perhaps this might help?

[uelsk8s]

you can make a repo on a cd
you just need to download a copy of the 2 repo scripts and run them in a folder with the packages then copy all the contents onto the cd.

the repo scripts are here http://ftp://ftp-osl.osuosl.org/pub/vectorlinux/veclinux-6.0/packages/makeinfo-slack
http://ftp://ftp-osl.osuosl.org/pub/vectorlinux/veclinux-6.0/packages/makeinfo-slapt

then you have to add a line like this:
SOURCE=file:///mnt/cdrom/
to your /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc

[pastorblue]

you can make a repo on a cd

Thank you for this suggestion, I will try it. Just to update, I tried the midnight commander suggestion and it didn't work for me - copies everything except the hidden files, which fail with an 'Invalid Argument' - exactly what happens with the cp command in terminal. Sorry to be slow getting back here when all you kind folks have contributed, but we not only have very slow internet in Zambia but also intermittent electricity supply, so a 7 hour cut last evening stopped everything

By the way, the method I do this same thing on Ubuntu is copy the two .bin files from /var/cache/apt and the entire contents of /var/cache/apt/archives from one machine to another, run apt-get update and any apt-get install x then draws on the copied files. This doesn't work in VL so far (obviously with slapt-get and the appropriate directories substituted).

Thank you again though - this is a really helpful community.

[nightflier]

fail with an 'Invalid Argument'

I would suspect a file system problem. Either a file is unreadable, or can not be written to the target. I would troubleshoot by first trying to copy the files to somewhere else locally, say /tmp. If that fails, I would start looking inside the files in question (using mc and F4), to see if they will open. You may end up deleting and starting over.

Another possibility is a problem with the target. Is it FAT or linux formatted?