Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Help needed

[rceckspurt13]

I've just recently installed it onto an old laptop of mine, and Im loving the operating system. Only problem is that I cannot use the software center or whatever to download software and programs because the laptop does not have internet connectivity. I was wondering if there was a way to download the programs on a separate computer and then install them on the laptop from a usb drive?

Also, I will be using this laptop to make a digital photo frame (already completed actually) and so I was wondering if there was a way to make it automatically start a slideshow when I power it on?

Thanks everyone.

P.S. as you can probably tell, I'm kinda a noob with linux. Maybe Ubuntu isnt the right distro for this application? If you know of any lighter/faster versions Id love to know about it. Basically it just needs to have a GUI, support USB, and play slideshows.

[jayd512]

Hello and Welcome!

We'll start with the easy one: Slide show. You can save all of the pictures that you want to a folder, and simply select that folder as your desktop background.
It will cycle through them for you. No settings needed.

Now for the software. That's a little more troublesome. You'll need to download the application or software to a USB stick, transfer it to your Ubuntu machine. When you try to install it, you may get a message that you need some dependencies installed first. In which case, you would need to also tackle all of those.

[rceckspurt13]

Thanks for the help. I did some looking and I found a site that said that the files to install programs had to be in a .deb format. is this correct, or do other file extensions work?

Also the slideshow thing worked, I just found out I needed to add an xml file to control the transitions. Thanks for getting me pointed in the right direction.

[jayd512]

You're correct about the .deb files.
You'll want to look into the command dpkg for som info: Ubuntu Manpage: dpkg - package manager for Debian

[Kolusion]

Welcome to your first negative experience of Linux. Your going to find 99% of Debian packages useless, as they tend to require dependencies. What you need are static packages, and almost no developers compliment along side their standard packages with them. There is some script thing you can do apparently that will fetch dependencies for your offline install, but I am sure you have better things to do that **** around with stupid issues that should not exist..

[jayd512]

After digging around a little bit, I found a page that should help you out a little bit: Installing packages without an Internet connection.

[rceckspurt13]

Hey sorry about the delay, I've been pretty wrapped up with school this quarter and haven't really been able to follow up on any of my projects. Thanks for all the help Jay. That last page was exactly what I needed! Ill be giving those methods a try very soon.

[MASONTX]

If you are on a laptop, can you move the laptop near your router and connect to the internet by ethernet cable?

[rceckspurt13]

This laptop is pre- ethernet and wifi. It has a dial-up modem instead. Well, had, I removed it when I was disassembling the laptop since it was never used.

When I used this laptop regularly, I got online through USB networking in windows xp, but Linux doesn't seem to support this?

[jayd512]

When I used this laptop regularly, I got online through USB networking in windows xp, but Linux doesn't seem to support this?

Many modern OSs lack support for USB connectivity.
Around 2006 - 2007, modem vendors started slacking off on releasing drivers for this. And that includes drivers for Vista and OSX 10.5+.
Even then, the USB drivers were sketchy, to say the least.
I've never really tried dealing with USB/modem drivers for Linux... so I can't guide you here.