Install Software onto Ubuntu via USB?

[killswitch]

Hey All,



I am wondering if there is a way to install software onto Ubuntu Gnome Desktop via USB. Anotherwords, I have a program that I want to put on Ubuntu, and I have unzipped it on Windows Vista, and threw it on my USB Stick.



Is there a command like



sudo apt-usb add

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install TCP Viewer 2.82



Or something like that? I know there is one for apt-cdrom add, but how do you install software from USB?

[D-cat]

It depends on how the program is packaged.

If what you have is a .deb file, then you can use sudo dpkg -i to install it (or just double-click in nautilus).

If what you have is an expanded tar.gz (or bz, etc), then you probably have source code that needs building and compiling. There should be a text file called INSTALL that'll explain the details for that package. In some cases you may find it necessary to install additional packages to make the compile (like build-essential).

Alas, if it's a Windows program (.exe), running it will be hit or miss, but you need to open it with wine (you may need to install it through synaptic first) and cross your fingers.

---

I don't know anything about "TCP Viewer", but you may be interested in a linux program called wireshark, which is a rather thorough packet analyzer. It can be installed via synaptic.

[killswitch]

D-cat,

Yeah I plan to put Wireshark on there. My supervisors would like both programs, however.

Basically, what I've done is I've downloaded TCP Viewer 2.82 onto my Windows Vista Machine, unzipped it, and threw the setup.exe and readme.txt onto my USB stick.

So wine will handle installation of exe files onto Linux?

[D-cat]

Wine is the program that handles .exe installation. Keep in mind that Wine does not allow "administrator" access, so how the program is designed to function will have an effect on if it even works in this application. If the program wants to take exclusive control of the network connection, expect it to fail. If it simply wants to monitor user connections, it might work. I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope though. Even wireshark must be run sudo in order to capture the connection. For security sake, you never do such a thing with wine.