Ubuntu – Does installing packages manually with dpkg prevent a future upgrade path

10.04dpkgpackage-managementserverupgrade

I manage a private network which has no internet connectivity due to the security policy of the customer. This network has a single Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server installation (soon to be several more) and I've been trying to customise it with software – however, I'm having to manually install packages with dpkg because of the lack of internet connectivity.

Does this prevent me from upgrading to a newer version of Ubuntu Server (LTS) when it becomes available, since the packags I've installed aren't ont he current distribution CD, they're unlikely to be on the newer releases also.

Best Answer

No. Installing packages from the official repositories using dpkg will not give you any problems down the road.

In fact, from a technical point of view, installing a package via dpkg is no different than if you had run sudo apt-get install package. The same things happen.

The only problem with installing packages with dpkg is that you will have to make sure that the dependencies are installed in the right order. If not, you could wind up with a corrupted package database.

I know this happens from personal experience...

Related Solutions

APT – Using dpkg to Install, Upgrade, and Dist-Upgrade Packages

Instead of using dpkg, which is a low level package manager, you'd be better off using apt. To install the .deb files using apt, copy them to the apt cache

sudo cp *.deb /var/cache/apt/archives/

and then just do the regular upgrade:

apt-get upgrade

The apt command will use the files in its cache rather than downloading it off the net, so that pretty much serves your purpose.

Ubuntu – Assigning a static IP to Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS

I'm not sure if this will solve your problem, but this answers your question and I think it's worth a shot.

To assign a static IP, you need to edit /etc/network/interfaces.

The interface will probably be called eth0.

The current entry will look something like:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

You will need to change this to:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
   address 10.253.0.50
   netmask 255.255.255.0
   network 10.253.0.0
   gateway 10.253.0.1
   dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8

You will have to change the numbers around depending on your network, but you can find out the information by checking out ipconfig from Windows.

Make sure you choose an address outside the address space of the DHCP server.

Then restart networking sudo service networking restart. If that gives you trouble, reboot the machine.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

APT – Using dpkg to Install, Upgrade, and Dist-Upgrade Packages

Ubuntu – Assigning a static IP to Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS

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