Installing on a box w/o net connection?

particle · n00b Joined: 21 Sep 2002 Posts: 2

Hello,

I'd love to install Gentoo on a box of mine. Unfortunately I don't have net access on this box at this time. So I was wondering if there was a way I could download all the neccessary files onto, say a CD, or the Windows partition and then install it from there? I'm sure this has been asked dozens of times before but I can't quite seem to find the answer.

Would there be a way that I could download files to CD once a week, or so, and upgrade my box?

Thanks!

pilla

Sure, you can download the files from ibiblio.org and them save then to a CD.

The update thing is a little bit tricker, probably you can do it with rsync in a non-gentoo box, but I don't think it would be trivial.

particle · n00b Joined: 21 Sep 2002 Posts: 2

What files would I need to download exactly?

Thanks!

rac · Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2002 11:46 pm Post subject:

Have you seen the entry in the official Gentoo FAQ called "I have only slow modem connection at home. Can I download sources somewhere else and add them to my system?"
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For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder

paramthegreat · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Aug 2002 Posts: 78

hmm,
i have read all that. but then i do not understand how would do emerge rsync and all the other steps from stage1 to stage3 without a net connection
thanx,
parminder

rac · Posted: Wed Sep 25, 2002 9:42 pm Post subject:

You could take a portage tree snapshot from http://cvs.gentoo.org/snapshots/, and untar it to create /usr/portage. That will eliminate the rsync step for you. You would have to put the sources that you downloaded into /usr/portage/distfiles.
_________________
For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder

kybber · Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2002 8:20 am Post subject:

I am currently trying to do the exact same thing. One problem I experienced was that in order to copy the necessary distfiles and tar'ed portage-tree from CD to /usr/portage, I had to unmount the install-CD first. But that is not possible since the CD is root. And if I chroot to /mnt/gentoo/ (as per install instructions), I can no longer mount/unmount anything (commands not found). The way I solved it was by booting into windows, moving the distfiles from CD to a fat32 partition, then boot the install-CD again, mount the partition and copy the files from there.

This is of course not possible for people that don't dualboot, so is there any way to exchange CDs during the installprocess?

rac · Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2002 8:24 am Post subject:

kybber · Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2002 8:41 am Post subject:

Hmm... I think you are right. Maybe I did something wrong? The livecd was installed as /cdroot (if I'm not mistaken - I can't test it since I'm at work.). When doing umount /cdroot I got the message that device is busy. And since I couldn't unmount, I couldn't eject. What could cause the CD to be busy? My cwd when trying to unmount was /root.

rac · Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2002 8:48 am Post subject:

kybber · Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2002 8:58 am Post subject:

Thanks for the tip - that's a very nice tool that I haven't been aware of until now! I'll try it out when I get home (which isn't until Monday evening since I'm going away for a long weekend).