Download Debs for Offline Installation

[egan]

Hi, I am helping a friend start with Ubuntu, and he doesn't have as fast an Internet connection as I do. I was wondering how I could easily download all the deb packages for the software I want to install for him.

It seems doing:
sudo apt-get install -d --reinstall <package>
Will download the packages for me, but it doesn't get the dependencies because I have already downloaded them... is there a way to get apt-get to get the dependencies as well?

Any advice is welcome.

[egan]

The idea of getting the dependencies is kinda scrapped since I realized that they would eventually trace to the entire system... I have decided to download some huge things (i.e. texlive-full) by hand, but now I am wondering how I would install it. There are 119 packages making up that installation, and I have no idea how I would install it. Do I just install them in any order? Can gdebi figure out that I have the dependencies as well?

[Bemk]

I've heard of a tool, called APT-on-cd, or something. I don't use it, since al 4 of my pc's have a working, fast, network connection, but I have seen it as solution for your kind of problem before.

[reed9]

Yeah, I think APTonCD is probably the easiest way.

aptoncd - Take your own repository with you on CD | Linux Operating System - Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch

[oz]

If you don't already know about it, you can find additional deb packages here just in case you should need them:

GetDeb - Software for Ubuntu Linux

[egan]

Hey guys, thanks for the suggestions.

Sadly I cleared my package cache a few months ago, so the only things I had were updates and texlive (that's good!). Luckily that was one of the main things I wanted to avoid downloading, I suppose I could go through and look at other things troublesome to download... when I am all done with this, would copying them to his /var/cache/apt/archives directory suffice to trick apt into not downloading them?

EDIT: Indeed this worked quite nicely... I only forgot to include a couple libraries, but the total download for >600 MB software was >10 MB.