[ubuntu-uk] (no subject)

[Alan Pope]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 11:12:59AM +0100, Andy wrote:
> On 04/06/07, Alan Pope <alan at popey.com> wrote:
> > There is a slight flaw with those options. They assume you are using linux
> > on the internet connected computer (in your case the library). This is
> > unlikely to be the case, and as such you would need to look at the file
> > generated (on your usb key) and manually grab the individual files onto the
> > key.
> 
> Is it not possible to automatically parse the generate file to work
> out which files to fetch and them fetch them automatically?
> Would be good to have an app that can do that. Probably best to do it
> in Java as that has the best deployment so is most likely to be on a
> public computer.
> Somebody must have thought of and done this before?
> 

Did you actually look at the sites I linked to? :)

The files are human readable lists of 

wget http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/foo/bar/baz/package.deb

> or another possibility would be to some how fetch a list of all
> installed packages put that on a USB stick an have an application that
> runs also on the stick and when hooked up to an Internet connected
> computer it downloads new package lists, finds out which packages to
> update and lets you chose new packages to install and grabs the files
> so they can be installed when you get back to your Linux PC. to be
> really clever it could install them for you when you get back.
> 

Remember the KISS principle and that this USB key is being put into someone 
elses computer - in this case the library. You cannot assume that you can 
run applications from or install applications from the USB key.

Maybe the wget script could be translated into an html page which the user 
just clicks the files to get them.

Cheers,
Al.