Offline Intrepid Upgrade

[Slim Joe]

2008/10/13, Arthur H. Johnson II <arthur.johnson at gmail.com>:
> On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, Slim Joe wrote:
>
>> I plan to beat the stampede. Is there a way to
>> download the packages necessary to upgrade U8.04
>> -- without performing the upgrade itself?
>>
>> Sort of like upgrade-manager -d --downloadonly?
>>
>> Basically I plan to store (probably using aptoncd)
>> packages unlikely to upgraded between now and Oct.
>> 30 (e.g. packages automatically merged from
>> Debian). Then I'll just torrent the release CD.
>
> If you change the apt sources to intrepid, you can run:
>
> apt-get -d -y dist-upgrade
>
> That will cache the packages in your apt sources.

I found a dumber solution (than editing the apt sources):

(1) run "sudo update-manager -d"
(2) choose the distribution upgrade option
(3) let Ubuntu download the update tool
(4) run the update tool until the first packages
are downloaded
(5) without aborting the upgrade* (yet), run synaptic as a regular user
(6) click on the icon "Mark All Upgrades"
(7) choose menu "File / Generate package download script"
(8) abort the upgrade

You are now ready to run as a regular user the
package_download_script.sh that consists of a series
of "wget package.deb" lines.

The downloaded packages can then be copied over
to /var/cache/apt/archives using either (a) synaptic
or (b) a simple "cp" command.

Caveat:
[*] No changes will be made to the system until
all packages are downloaded so it should be safe
to run and abort the update until then. Unless
you're downloading just a few MB's or KB's of
files, you should have at least a few minutes to
abort before the upgrade reaches the point of
no return.