How to download an offline package?

Question

I just moved and I was forced by the wife to place my computer in a certain spot :(.

Anyways, I do not have a long enough ethernet cable to my desktop. However, I did go on amazon and buy what I thought was a decent dual band USB WiFi adapter: Realtek 8811CU

Guess what ... needs a driver installed. According to some google searches, I want to do this:

sudo apt install build-essential -y
mkdir -p ~/build
cd ~/build
sudo apt install git
git clone https://github.com/brektrou/rtl8821CU.git
cd rtl8821CU
make
sudo make install

I need some help. How can I accomplish this by downloading the files on windows and transferring them to Ubuntu? Maybe it is a better idea to hook up a cell phone as a tethered hot spot and then get that driver?

Thanks Mike

This answer over here might give you exactly what you’re looking for — , Feb 21 '21 at 04:07
Lots of great USB WiFi adapters work great out-of-the-box without the need to compile drivers. One option is to simply return your dongle for a works-out-of-the-box model. — user535733, Feb 21 '21 at 04:38

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 21 '21 at 04:35

For the apt portions:

On the offline system, get the list of packages that you will need to download.

The easy way to do this is apt install build-essential git --simulate The output will include the complete list of packages (and the correct versions) that you need to download.
- Some of your instructions include apt's -y flag. I recommend against using that flag outside of scripts. It disables an important safeguard.
On an online system (any OS), go to https://packages.ubuntu.com

Download each package
- It's super important to get the correct version. DON'T try a different version, or a package from a different release of Ubuntu. You can really mess up your system by doing that.
- Get EVERY packages on your list, or you will get errors in the next step.
On the offline system, place all the packages in /var/cache/apt/archives. That's where apt will look for them.

Now you're ready to run sudo apt install build-essential git
- DON'T list every package you copied. Apt resolves dependencies. Let it do the job.

score -1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 21 '21 at 03:58

Your situation is a perfect candidate for Windows Subsystems for Linux (WSL2). This technology will allow you to run Linux on your Windows 10 computer if Windows is what you have. Here is the link to the WSL2 documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

I hope this helps!

How to download an offline package?

2 Answers2