Debian has thousands of packages in the official repo, so it is possible to download 5 blu-ray discs then merge the ISOs into a single ~90gb ISO containing all apps. From there, that disk can be used to install apps at any moment without Internet access.

Then when Debian moves to a new release, it’s possible to go to a public library and fetch only apps that changed because jigdo can use the previous disk to build the new ISOs.

Apparently Ubuntu and Fedora both also have the same jigdo capability. Is that all? Are there any other distros that:

  1. have a good number of officially supported apps, and
  2. have a download manager that can build a full release using the previous release

?

I am assuming jigdo is the only game in town, and that without a *.jigdo file we can only fetch whole new set of images when a new version is released. Correct?

  • evujumenuk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    There was a guy who installed every nixpkgs package, ending up with 1.3 TB of installed software. The system was still usable, but you can of course elect to not keep tens of thousands of binaries in your PATH and still have them in your on-disk cache, which would basically enable fully offline package management.

    No idea if there’s some script to prefill your cache or something. Does it count if you can bring your laptop to the library and run nix-env -i?

    • nonserf@libretechni.caOPEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      Does it count if you can bring your laptop to the library and run nix-env -i?

      AFAIK, it’s possible with any distro to go to the library every time an app needs to be installed. That’s what I’m looking to avoid. I want the whole collection of interoperable versions of officially supported apps on a disk. Then I can spontaniously install something without a working connection. When I go to the library for any reason, I can opportunistically build an updated release.

      Another part of this is having multiple machines (some of which are too big to bring to the library). The install disk requires 1 fetch of emacs, for example, which can then be installed many times on offline machines.

      • evujumenuk@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        5 days ago

        If every Nix store path is cached, there’s no need for a network connection to link any of them into your system, and you can serve your cache to other systems you have.

        If I understand you correctly, what you want is sort of the exact inverse of something like omnibin, where every binary in nixpkgs is in the PATH but gets fetched on the fly, whereas you want to have every package lying in wait on your disk but not really visible to your runtime environment.

        • nonserf@libretechni.caOPEnglish
          0·
          4 days ago

          Kind of. I have plenty of spare hard drives lying around from curb-dumped hardware. But what I do not have is a single large hard drive in my laptop. So normally with Debian I have Debian 12.4, for example, on a spare drive, which was dd’d from a 90gb ISO. It’s a full blown installation disk plus all official apps. Then whenever I need to install an app I can USB-attach that drive, mount, and do apt install $newapp.

          I am not familiar with nixOS, but I assume that is what you are talking about. So I guess the question is: would it be practical to create (on a separate spare drive) a cache of all nixOS official apps, all with interoperable version numbers that match whatever release I am running?

          • evujumenuk@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            4 days ago

            Achieving something with Linux is rarely impossible, but I’m guessing “something with union mounts” wouldn’t be quite as slick as you’re probably envisioning. What other NixOS users do for this kind of problem is hosting a package cache on a local networked machine. In rpm/deb terms, that would be like hosting a repository mirror and making that reachable over the LAN.

            I assume there’s a reason you don’t already do that.

  • basic_user@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    I’m relatively new to Linux and I am also interested in offline setups. I have not found many resources os the topic and don’t know what jigdo is, but it sounds interesting. What about drivers? Lets say you need to make a fresh install on an unknown offline machine, maybe for a friend for instance. How to you have a wide range of different drivers to support various hardware such as soundcards, motherboards, graphic cards and such?

    I’ve manages to make a hackish offline backup of a Manjaro install where I export the installed packages and then import to a new install and that worked, but it’s not ideal and cumbersome to maintain.