emerge + Sneakernet / update offline via removable media

[jago25_98]

How to use Gentoo without a fast connection directly connected:

Believe it or not you don't need a fast ISP to use Gentoo. In fact Gentoo IMHO can be one of the best distros for those with slow
connections, but with access to a fast connection via removeable media AKA SneakerNet.

Broadband command | Sneakernet Equivelent

'emerge sync'

- Download latest portage.tgz snapshot from the chosen gentoo mirror manually.
- cd /usr
- tar zxvf portageSnapshot.tar.gz OR tar jxvf portageSnapshot.bz2 for bunzip2 archives

'emerge -uf world'

- emerge -upf world | awk '{print $1}' >> /mnt/removableMedia/wantlist.txt
^ the -upf means update,pretend and get files only. p+f in conjunction outputs the files it would try to download including the various
locations it would try to get them from. Output from the emerge command is piped into awk to delete everything but the 1st word on every
line, in this case a url http://foo.com/foo.tar.gz , this is then outputted via stdout to a textfile on the disk you take to work/whatever.

- get to where the fast connection is (i.e. the T1 at work)
- download wget for the operating system you use on the fast connection (ftp://sunsite.dk/projects/wget/windows/ for example)
- run a dos prompt if neccessary
- cd to your removeable media
- run c:\foo\wget.exe -i wantlist.txt
^ Where foo is where you downloaded wget. This will cause wget to go thought the file you made earlier looking for files that it can download. Look at the output for errors to make
sure everything went ok.

- you now have a disk filled with "distfiles" that can then be taken home. Copy these off the portable media and into /usr/portage/distfiles/

-> now you can run `emerge -u world`

'emerge <package>'

(Where package is the gentoo program you want to download)
- emerge -fp <package> | awk '{print $1}' >> /mnt/removableMedia/package.txt
- wget -i package.txt
- copy to /usr/portage/distfiles
- emerge <package>

Personally I use one of those pocket USB drives, zip disks, cdrw and firewire external harddrives.

There we are. Any questions /discussions to my spammail jago25_98@hotmail.com

cya

[mrboot]

Its been a while since the original post from jago25_98 and obviously not many gentooists use the offline method as the info in the post above no longer works! It seems that Portage is outputting the URLs differently to the rest of the text so the command should now be:

[jago25_98]

I've just come back to this thread after a long while out.

the code that works for me is (i think)

[Hackeron]

for url in $(emerge -pf $@ 2>&1); do echo "$url" | egrep 'http://|ftp://'; done

[joho8705]

is there a way to remove alot of the links, instead of downloading multiple files? just use 1 or 2 mirrors for each package.

[sebhtml]

I just did a ruby script to extract the first column of each line.

[whiteghost]

i am using sneakernet now. with one mirror set in my make.conf and this command

[Dr.Willy]

[whiteghost]

[aoeuaoue]

just do: