Ubuntu
update-manager package

To make ubuntu USB stick

Asked by vishal

Dear friends
I've been using ubuntu 11.10 for some time and I am happy with it now i want to install it on my desktop but i don't have access to internet there ,the desktop is currently running on ubuntu 11.04. I wanted to make a USB key to upgrade it.But since I have already upgraded my laptop from 11.04 to 11.10 is there a way to copy my upgrades directly to usb drive .. the option to go by create a start up drive is asking the location of image ..which i don't know where to look at ? please help.. and also is there a way to instal software from software center on USB drive and then install it on another computer just like .exe files on windows.Thanks for sparing time to read my problem and helping me out.

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Eliah Kagan
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Best Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure) said : 		#1

"But since I have already upgraded my laptop from 11.04 to 11.10 is there a way to copy my upgrades directly to usb drive"

If you still have the .deb files that were fetched in the upgrade, you could use them to build an .iso from scratch that can be used to upgrade. But you should not do this. You'd likely have to download most of the content again anyway, and it would take a lot of time and effort, and it would be easy to do wrong, leading to errors that would be difficult to debug.

You should download the Ubuntu 11.10 .iso image on the computer that has the Internet connection, write it to a USB flash drive, bring that flash drive over to the machine that doesn't have the Internet connection, and upgrade either by:

(1) Specifying that it be used as a software source, and using the Update Manager.

(2) Booting from it, and selecting the option to upgrade the installed system.

Once you're upgraded (or if you were to decide not to upgrade), you could keep the machine that is not connected to the Internet up to date using Keryx (http://keryxproject.org/).

It is also possible to bring .deb files over to this system manually (.deb files correspond to .msi files on Windows...many installers are .exe files that contain .msi files). If you're manually downloading .deb files, Launchpad is probably the best way to get them, because it uses HTTPS and thus your downloads are digitally signed, reducing the risk of data corruption during transfer. You can find the .deb files for a particular package in Ubuntu by searching for the package at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu. Then, when you get to the package page (for example, https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/abiword for AbiWord), you'd expand the entry for the latest version under your release that says release, updates, or security (you can use proposed or backports if you want, but make sure you understand what they are), then get the listed .deb file or files for your architecture (i386 for 32-bit PC, amd64 for 64-bit PC, regardless of what company manufactured your computer's CPU; i386 for 32-bit Mac with an Intel processor, or amd64 for a 64-bit Mac with an Intel processor), and also the deb file(s) marked "all" instead of specifying an architecture (these apply to all systems). You'll also need to get all the dependencies for the software, which you can look up at http://packages.ubuntu.com or which you can try to figure out by simulating installation by running "apt-get -s install ..." on the target machine (without the Internet connection). Put all the .deb files in a folder and install them with "dpkg -Ri FOLDERNAME" .

Using Keryx is easier and works better. ;-)

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vishal (zvesda1) said : 		#2

Thanks Eliah Kagan, that solved my question.