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Quick and Easy

Just download my bash script gen-ubuntu-dvds.sh and start it in a folder with at least 30GB of free space. After some time you have (next to some other stuff) four ISO images of Ubuntu including the repositories main, restricted, universe, and multiverse for ubuntu, ubuntu-security, and ubuntu-updates. To get the latest updates simply re-run the script. Don’t worry, only updated packages will be downloaded this time.

Step by Step

Sometimes I need to install Ubuntu on a computer without or with a very low bandwidth connection to the Internet. The major distros come with DVDs including most packages one might need. The Ubuntu DVDs only contain packages supported by Canonical and therefore lots of goodies are missing like ScummVM, Wesnoth or Supertux

Here is a short description how to generate your own set of Ubuntu DVDs including the repositories main, restricted, universe, and multiverse including all updates and security patches. These packages take about 14GB and contain very much of the open source world. They fit on 3 DVDs and one CD.

First you need to set up a local mirror of the Ubuntu repositories. The following command mirrors main, restricted, universe and multiverse from dapper, dapper-security, and dapper-updates. This takes a while, as you are downloading all of Ubuntu.

$ debmirror --nosource -m --passive --host=archive.ubuntu.com --root=ubuntu/ --method=ftp --progress --dist=dapper,dapper-security,dapper-updates --section=main,restricted,universe,multiverse --arch=i386 ubuntu/ --ignore-release-gpg

Then the directory has to be split up in DVD sized chunks and package descriptions for these directories have to be generated.

$ debpartial --nosource --dirprefix=ubuntu --section=main,restricted,universe,multiverse --dist=dapper,dapper-security,dapper-updates --size=DVD ubuntu/ ubuntu-dvds/

Using debcopy the newly generated directories for the DVDs are filled with symlinks to the actual packages. Debcopy is included in the package debpartial and has to be extracted first.

$ cp /usr/share/doc/debpartial/examples/debcopy.gz .
$ gunzip debcopy.gz

$ ruby debcopy -l ubuntu/ ubuntu-dvds/ubuntu0
$ ruby debcopy -l ubuntu/ ubuntu-dvds/ubuntu1
$ ruby debcopy -l ubuntu/ ubuntu-dvds/ubuntu2
$ ruby debcopy -l ubuntu/ ubuntu-dvds/ubuntu3


And finally the ISO images are generated.

$ mkisofs -f -J -r -V "Ubuntu 6.06.x $(date -I) 1/4" -o ubuntu-6.06.x-$(date -I)-complete-i386-dvd1.iso ubuntu-dvds/ubuntu0
...

To burn the images simply browse with Nautilus to the folder and right click the image -> Write to Disk.

Much information has been taken from Ramon’s description. It has been extended to all repositories and distros (-security and -updates).

Feedback is very welcome! Please send me also info about issues you might encounter.

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Welcome at the blog of Anna, Sarah, Johanna, and Robert Entner. I guess it will be mostly used by me (Burt) for my techie-stuff.

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