No net - no gentoo?

[liku]

Hello,
Is there a way to use gentoo offline? Here's mine story:
I was lucky, last vacation I had ultra-fast internet connection and I could easly install and upgrade gentoo, evrything worked fine.
Problems occured when I had to move to a flat with no internet connection. Luckly I found a small howto how to upgrade packages offline, but it was very very old (2 years? Unfortunatelly I've lost the link quickly) and didn't work to well. I remembered I need to fetch files to upgrade (do it locally), download needed files and portage tree. But the trick with 'emerge -f' seems not to fetch all needed files (or I did something wrong) and I feel a bit confused about the 'tar xzf portage[...]' command. Is there a diffrence between the 'tar xfz [...]' command and 'emerge sync'? Does anyone know how to solve this problem? Or know the link which I lost (about doing upgrades offline) I have access to fast internet connection and I can download as many data as I wish, maybe there's a simple synchronisation script?
Recently I was on some linux meeting and I was said that if I want to use gentto I must have internet connection (and that gentoo was created for guys with access to internet), no internet = use binary packages. I don't belive it...
Thanks, I was supposed to write a simple synchronisation script but work and studies take all my time.
Bye bye!
_________________
Lukasz Goralczyk
http://sagittariusa.eu

[kmj0377]

You can get a portage snapshot here:
http://gentoo.chem.wisc.edu/gentoo/snapshots/
(this is on every mirror)
This will get your ebuilds up to date. Not sure on the fetch shortcut, but emerge --fetchonly yourpackage will get all the files. You can also look in the ebuilds for the files you need and get them directly from the mirrors manually. Or this thread shows how to get a list of files as well https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=64178&highlight=offline+installation


Yes, there is a very big difference between tar xfz and emerge sync. One is for extracting a .tar.gz file and one is for updating your portage tree.

[secondshadow]

well first off emerge and tar do two very different things. You should know what emerge does; tar is an archiving utility. As for what you need to do, its pretty easy I would think. Heres an outline as I see it:

1) download most recent portage snapshot
2) un-tar snapshot (thats the tar -zxf thing...although it's actually tar -jxf in this case. And that - is important)
3) do 'emerge -pU world' or 'emerge -pUD world'
4) Note all the packages that need updating.
5) now, download all of the "distfiles" you need and put them in /usr/portage/distfiles. If it looks like there are patches for a specific package, you should probably download those too just in case you need them (they will be '.patch' files). They go in distfiles as well.
6) emerge -U world or emerge -UD world

A note:
The difference between -UD and -U is the 'D' checks the entire dependancy tree of all installed and to-be-update packages. I had a problem with -U not catching a dep and emerge failing, but then I tried -UD and the extra dep was caught, and thus it succeeded. I do know why its not default though, as I've seen other wierdnesses with it....mostly just while installing my base system...but thats another discussion.

If any single step need elaboration, let me know.

EDIT: Lol....kmj0337 beet me too it

[liku]

Hello,
Thanks, I should handle it now. Bye bye!
_________________
Lukasz Goralczyk
http://sagittariusa.eu