Building DVD Images Of Ubuntu Repositories

1 Preliminary Note

This tutorial was inspired by an articles I read at http://cargol.net/~ramon/ubuntu-dvd-en. So many thanks to Ramon Acedo (the one who made this HowTo, originally)

The pages are not reachable from some weeks, now. I saved the page to read it off-line. So...

I found it useful. I hope it will be the same for you.

2 Introduction

This howto offers a simple way of creating DVD images of Debian or Ubuntu http/ftp repositories.

Ubuntu doesn't offer DVDs ready to download with its main,universe,multiverse and/orrestricted repositories. With the contents of this howto you can do it yourself.

Having the Ubuntu or Debian repositories on DVD can be useful for those users who don't have access to the Internet where they have their Ubuntu installed but have access somewhere else to download the repository and build and burn the DVDs.

3 Building a local mirror

We have to install debmirror:

sudo apt-get install debmirror

Now we get the Ubuntu repositories in a local directory. In the example below we get main, universe and multiverse sections of the repository in the i386 architecture.

debmirror --nosource -m --passive --host=archive.ubuntulinux.org --root=ubuntu/ --method=ftp --progress --dist=dapper --section=main,multiverse,universe --arch=i386 ubuntu/ --ignore-release-gpg

You could change the options below as you prefer:

• --host - the URL of the repository.
• --dist - the distro of your OS (dapper, edgy, sarge, ... ).
• --section - the section you want to mirror locally.
• --arch - the architecture of your box.

4 Separating the archive into DVD-sized directories

The repositories we got are too big (about 30Gb) to burn them to a DVD so we have to separate them into volumes.

The tool debpartial will do it for us.

sudo apt-get install debpartial

We make the directory where the volumes will reside.

mkdir ubuntu-dvd

and we make it to construct the package descriptors to every volume.

debpartial --nosource --dirprefix=ubuntu --section=main,universe,multiverse --dist=dapper --size=DVD ubuntu/ ubuntu-dvd/

Now we have to put the packages into the directories debpartial has just created. The scriptdebcopy which also comes with the debpartial package will do it. The script needsruby.

sudo apt-get install ruby

If everything is ok...

ruby debcopy ubuntu/ ubuntu-dvd/ubuntu0
ruby debcopy ubuntu/ ubuntu-dvd/ubuntu1
ruby debcopy ubuntu/ ubuntu-dvd/ubuntu2

Where ubuntu/ is the directory with the complete repository created withdebmirror andubuntu-dvd/* are the directories ready to host the new DVD-ready repository.
If we want to make soft links from the complete repository instead of copying the packages we can calldebcopy with the option-l:

ruby debcopy -l ubuntu/ ubuntu-dvd/ubuntu0
ruby debcopy -l ubuntu/ ubuntu-dvd/ubuntu1
ruby debcopy -l ubuntu/ ubuntu-dvd/ubuntu2

Now every directory (ubuntu0, ubuntu1 and ubuntu2) fits on one DVD.

5 Making iso images

To get the directories ubuntu0, ubuntu1, ubuntu2 into an iso image ready to burn we can usemkisofs:

mkisofs -f -J -r -o ubuntu-dvd-0.iso ubuntu-dvd/ubuntu0
mkisofs -f -J -r -o ubuntu-dvd-1.iso ubuntu-dvd/ubuntu1
mkisofs -f -J -r -o ubuntu-dvd-2.iso ubuntu-dvd/ubuntu2

Now you can burn the iso images or mount them. Add them to the /etc/apt/source.list with the command:

sudo apt-cdrom add

Now we can verify the new repositories...

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

... and, if I explain in the right way, you should have your box upgraded.

6 About the script 'debcopy'

I heard about someone who can not find the script debcopy, above described.
In that case, create a new file called debcopy where you want:

gedit /your_path_to/debcopy

and copy the lines below inside it:

#!/usr/bin/ruby## debcopy - Debian Packages/Sources partial copy tool## Usage: debcopy [-l]  ##  where  is a top directory of a debian archive,#  and  is a top directory of a new debian partial archive.##  debcopy searches all Packages.gz and Sources.gz under /dists#  and copies all files listed in the Packages.gz and Sources.gz#  files into  from . -l creates symbolic links#  instead of copying files.## Copyright (C) 2002  Masato Taruishi ##  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify#  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by#  the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or#  (at your option) any later version.##  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,#  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of#  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the#  GNU General Public License for more details.##  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License with#  the Debian GNU/Linux distribution in file /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL;#  if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place,#  Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA#require 'getoptlong'require 'zlib'require 'ftools'$link = falsedef usage  $stderr.puts "Usage: #{__FILE__} [-l]  "   exit 1enddef each (file, &block)  fin = Zlib::GzipReader.open(file)  fin.each do |line|    yield line  end  fin.closeenddef each_file (file, &block)  each(file) do |line|    if /Filename: (.*)/ =~ line      yield $1    end  endenddef each_sourcefile (file, &block)  dir = nil  each(file) do |line|    case line    when /^Directory: (.*)$/      dir = $1    when /^ \S+ \d+ (\S+)$/      yield dir + "/" + $1    end  endenddef calc_relpath (source, dest)  pwd = Dir::pwd  Dir::chdir source  source = Dir::pwd  Dir::chdir pwd  Dir::chdir dest  dest = Dir::pwd  Dir::chdir pwd  src_ary = source.split("/")  src_ary.shift  dest_ary = dest.split("/")  dest_ary.shift  return dest if src_ary[0] != dest_ary[0]  src_ary.clone.each_index do |i|    break if src_ary[0] != dest_ary[0]    src_ary.shift    dest_ary.shift  end  src_ary.size.times do |i|    dest_ary.unshift("..")  end  dest_ary.join("/")enddef do_copy(path)  if $link    pwd=calc_relpath(File.dirname($dest_dir + "/" + path), $source_dir)    File.symlink(pwd + "/" + path, $dest_dir + "/" + path)  else    File.copy($source_dir + "/" + path, $dest_dir + "/" + path)  endenddef copy(path)  s=$source_dir + "/" + path  d=$dest_dir + "/" + path  if FileTest.exist?(d)    $stats["ignore"] += 1    return  end  if FileTest.exist?(s)    File.mkpath(File.dirname(d))    do_copy(path)    $stats["copy"] += 1  else    $stats["notfound"] += 1    $stderr.puts s + " not found."  endendopts = GetoptLong.new(["--symlink", "-l", GetoptLong::NO_ARGUMENT],      ["--help", "-h", GetoptLong::NO_ARGUMENT])opts.each do |opt,arg|  case opt  when "--symlink"    $link = true  when "--help"    usage  endendusage if ARGV.size != 2$source_dir = ARGV.shift$dest_dir = ARGV.shiftif $link  $source_dir = Dir::pwd + "/" + $source_dir unless $source_dir =~ /\A\//  $dest_dir = Dir::pwd + "/" + $dest_dir unless $dest_dir =~ /\A\//end$stats = {}$stats["ignore"] = 0$stats["copy"] = 0$stats["notfound"] = 0open("|find #{$dest_dir}/dists -name Packages.gz") do |o|  o.each_line do |file|    file.chomp!    print "Processing #{file}... "    $stdout.flush    each_file(file) do |path|      copy(path)    end    puts "done"  endendopen("|find #{$dest_dir}/dists -name Sources.gz") do |o|  o.each_line do |file|    file.chomp!    print "Processing #{file}... "    $stdout.flush    each_sourcefile(file.chomp) do |path|      copy(path)    end    puts "done"  endendputs "Number of Copied Files: " + $stats["copy"].to_sputs "Number of Ignored Files: " + $stats["ignore"].to_sputs "Number of Non-existence File: " + $stats["notfound"].to_s