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I actually want to use my mobile to download updates as my internet is not so fast and I have to keep my computer running for a long time to install them. I want to download them in my mobile and then install later by transferring them to computer.

Masroor
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rainlover
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  • Can't you just connect your computer to the internet on your phone? You could download the files manually on your phone and move them to your apt cache afterwards, but it is going to be a lot of work. – RudolphEst Mar 01 '13 at 12:29
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    What @RudolphEst says above, but as you have Android your option is to use your mobile's tethering and use then your mobile as you would use any wireless network - connect to internet via Wireless Network it's going to create. Search for info on tethering on internet or in applications/settings of your mobile. – catalesia Mar 01 '13 at 16:45
  • I by no mean want to keep my computer "running". Just that is my problem. I run internet on my computer through tethering only and on 2G network. I don't have broadband for now. – rainlover Mar 02 '13 at 02:31

2 Answers2

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For a situation like the one you described, I think that synaptic will be appropriate for your purpose.

(I had the same scenario you described, dial up connection at home, and high speed connection at my office.)

Short Version

Use synaptic to create a shell script in the slow machine. Run the script in the fast machine to download packages. Copy back the downloaded packages to the slow machine. Use synaptic to install the packages.

Long Version

If synaptic is not installed in your machine, you will have to install it.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install synaptic

I understand that your computer has very slow speed. But I hope that it can cope with the update and around 2500 K download for the above installation.

Start synaptic,

sudo synaptic

You get the opening window of synaptic. Select the files you want to install using the Search function.

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Marks the packages you want to select, either left mouse click or right mouse menu-select. Finish marking all the packages you want.

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From the File menu generate the download script.

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Save the script at some convenient location. Use any file name you like. Let us say your name is mydownloads.sh

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If you close synaptic, you can ignore the warning about not installed packages.

The script is a simple shell script, containing a series of wget commands, like the following,

#!/bin/sh
wget -c http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/c/cadubi/cadubi_1.3-2_all.deb

Copy the script to your mobile, start a terminal, move to the directory where you copied the script and run it there. 

sudo ./mydownloads.sh

Please remember that wget needs to be installed in that device. If it is not installed, install

sudo apt-get install wget

Once finished running the script (it may take some time depending on the Internet speed and volume of download), you will get a number of .deb files in the directory from where you run the script. Copy those files back to your computer and run synaptic again.

sudo synaptic

From the file menu, use the Add downloaded package function to select the directory in your computer where you copied the downloaded files.

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Click on Apply. Installation of your downloaded packages should go without any problem.

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From time to time, you will need to run 

sudo apt-get update

at your slow speed machine, select Mark All Upgrades in synaptic and then go through the process of generating the script, download the files at your high speed machine, and then install the downloaded files to keep the slow machine upgraded.

enter image description here

Masroor
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  • And that is exactly the long hard way I warned about in my first comment! Seems like too much effort to me. I'd really rather just find a fast network to use temporarily for updates. – RudolphEst Mar 01 '13 at 16:58
  • Just by reading your short version, I came to know that you want me to use another computer but this thing is not in my reach. I just have one computer and my mobile. That's all. BTW very much thanks to you for providing me solution with screenshots. But that's not of any use to me for now. But may be in future (as this question will remain saved in my account). And surely this tutorial will benefit many other users. I just wanted to download some files but I should have said that I don't have any fast computer available. – rainlover Mar 02 '13 at 02:40
  • @spacelover Sorry for the misunderstanding. I was under the impression that you mobile is also capable of working as a small yet fast computer. Still, if you want, you can get complete URL of the files to be downloaded from the generated script. You can use these URLs to download the files in your mobile. Hope your mobile can download files from given URLs and I am not misunderstanding yet again. – Masroor Mar 02 '13 at 06:09
  • Yeah Sure My mobile can download any file. Its Android 2.3 with 1GHz processor and near 120MB RAM. But it don't have a terminal (though there is an emulator in play store) and wget is not in play store. But I can just use URLs. – rainlover Mar 02 '13 at 07:45
  • @spacelover That is really great. Just use the URLs and download the files. May be you will want to go a step further and use some downloader in your mobile with a facility to extract the URLs from the shell script. I am not sure what to use. I am very underexposed to Android. Or may be you will want to write an awk or a perl script to extract the URLs, may be in the slow machine or in your mobile. The possibilities and methods are always there. – Masroor Mar 02 '13 at 11:50
  • I don't know how to write scripts. These terms are out of my mind. Thanks btw. I'll try to find that downloader and/or use URLs. – rainlover Mar 02 '13 at 23:02
  • @spacelover Assuming your script file name is mydownloads.sh, this command (in your Linux machine) tail -n +2 mydownloads.sh | cut -d ' ' -f 3 > mydownloadslist.txt will produce the list of URLs in mydownloadslist.txt. HTH. (Just as a side note, tail prints lines starting from line 2, this when piped through cut, shows only the 3rd field delimited by space.) – Masroor Mar 03 '13 at 02:42
  • :-k I'll use it when I install Ubuntu. I was thinking of installing it when a new version is released next month but it is rumored that Raring Ringtail may be skipped.. :/ Though I've used Ubuntu 12.04 but it didn't run smoothly on my computer and therefore I'm looking for installing a new version. – rainlover Mar 07 '13 at 12:03
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Keryx is one possible solution to your problem.

With Keryx you can decide what to download (updates included) and then download them on another computer.

If Keryx doesn't work as advertised, there is a step by step procedure for using Keryx v0.92.4.1

Community
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To Do
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  • I have an android device. Can I run Keryx on Android? OR from where I can manually download updates which Keryx is going to download for me. I think Ubuntu should have separate files which can downloaded via a download manager and then installed. – rainlover Mar 01 '13 at 14:23
  • @to-do, Keryx is somewhat outdated, with the last release on 2011-01-01. Is that a good choice? – Masroor Mar 01 '13 at 15:12
  • Although I don't know if there is a problem running Keryx on Android, I think one advantage over using Synaptic as described is that you don't need to know beforehand what packages you have to download. – carnendil Mar 01 '13 at 18:51
  • @carnendil I will have to disagree here. Without knowing the packages, how do you decide which packages to install? Is not it the same for apt-get or software center? Synaptic is completely the same. You decide which software to install, the rest is automatic. Whether you run the shell script or just press Apply. The situation is the same for upgrades as well.

    Wanted to know more about keryx, found this at [link] (http://askubuntu.com/questions/127923/how-can-i-update-ubuntu-offline-without-using-synaptic-or-keryx/181913#181913). Do not see much difference from the way synaptic works.

     – Masroor Mar 02 '13 at 00:38
  • @MMA maybe I expressed myself wrongly. It seems to me (and I might be wrong) that you would have to find out which packages have an update in order to generate the package download script before you get to the computer with (good) internet connection. In the case discussed here, it is fine because there is some kind of internet access, good enough to download the latest package lists. But if you didn't have this possibility, it would not be easy to generate the script. That is not the case with Keryx. Otherwise, you are right in that they work basically the same: Keryx mimics Synaptic. – carnendil Mar 04 '13 at 15:13