Emerging from another place

[mark4gentoo]

Hello,

my internet connection at home is very poor (slow UMTS ).

Is there a way to download packages from university and emerge them on my system at home. Somebody told me to download the tar files and to copy them into the portage. But how exactly does this work, and does this have any disadvantages, is there some kind of "official" gentoo documentation covering this issue?

Tanks a lot!

[davidgurvich]

Just make sure you have the correct version of the tar files. You won't need every file as you have a connection, so anything you miss can be downloaded, but you should read the ebuild files in /usr/portage to find out which version you need.
Generic example
1)Pretend to fetch the files
emerge mypackage -fp >> filelist.txt
That will give you a list of the files you need along with where you might get them.
It includes any files portage feels you might need.
2)Download them from the computer with a faster connection
wget .....
3)Copy them to the /usr/portage/distfiles directory
cp /path/to/files/* /usr/portage/distfiles
4)emerge mypackage

If you got the biggest files this should help, but you will still need to compile everything.

[mark4gentoo]

Thanks a lot! Did you try this yourself? Are there any shortcomes with this method?

[Fourbissime]

hi.

I'm currently using this method to download packages at work - here are a few more hints.

It seems that when you do emerge -fp myebuild, the addresses go out on error output or something like that. plus, copy/paste the whole thing won't directly work. If an ebuild has several sources, all sources are printed - so it tries to download it several time if you don't edit the file.

That would be a great portage option to directly generate a proper wget output ...

[derverstand]

Hi Mark,

Recently I wrote a script for my cluster to fetch a complete mirror. The main problem with using gentoo offline is: A common gentoo mirror doesn't contain all sources. There are external dependecies (i.e. xorg.7). So if you want to use gentoo offline, you got to
(1) rsync a portage
(2) rsync a gentoo mirror
(3) parse all ebuilds in the downloaded portage, and check for external files
(4) setup make.conf (portage- and distfiles-source)

Best regards!

[NeddySeagoon]

mark4gentoo,

You need sneakernet
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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