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For offline people: which linux distros can be installed and maintained offline? Debian and Ubuntu of course (thanks to JigDo). Any others? (libretechni.ca)

submitted 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) by nonserf@libretechni.ca to c/linux@linux.community

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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:

have a good number of officially supported apps, and
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?

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[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 5 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

There's systemd.offline-updates as well. Guess several other distros which support that, can, or could do offline updates as well. For example there's pacman-offline for Arch.

[–] evujumenuk@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours 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?

[–] basic_user@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours 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.