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In connection with this question (not that many people seem to be on Server Fault yet).


I'm trying to put the whole of Cygwin on a DVD, so I can have it with me for an offline install on a computer which doesn't have network connection. I downloaded setup.exe, put "download without install" and selected Current version and under "All" I selected "Install".

After it downloaded all of it, I burned it onto a DVD.

Now when I try to install the thing, it reports some missing dependencies and gives out a lot of "NULL" (and I do mean A LOT) of errors.

Can somebody tell me where did I go wrong ? I'm assuming what I'm trying to do (put it on a DVD) is possible using that technnique ?


Just to notice. I'm not trying to create a live Cygwin disc, just put the installer on the DVD to be able to install it onto the hard disk drive.


I swear, I must be the only person in the world who gets his own name wrong.

A: 

You sure can! First link I found: Cygwin Offline Install

Buggabill
I did almost exactly that (except put everything in a directory called cygwin), and it didn't work. Relative paths were kept. Do you think that could be the problem source ?
+3  A: 

The easiest way to do this is to do the following:

1) Run the Cygwin setup.exe

2) Choose "Download without Installing"

3) When prompted, provide the "Local Package Directory" - this should be different from your root directory specified in the previous step.

4) Choose all the packages you need

5) Let the download proceed

Now you need to put the entire Local Package directory on your CD, including the parent. So, if you set the local package directory to c:\temp\CygPack, copy the CygPack directory to your CD without changing anything inside of it. Then:

1) Run the Cygwin setup.exe

2) Choose "Install from Local Directory"

3) Choose the package directory (CygPack)

4) Proceed with the install

The most important part of this is to change nothing in the package directory, and select the same top level directory you used during the download. The installer expects to find the directories/files in a certain layout.

JeffP
This works fine. I use the same technique to maintain a local copy of the installation to allow multiple people to install from the same place. Additionally, i also update the local install directory (can do that since i retain it on the server rather than do a DVD write). You could also do the same later with the burned DVD; just copy the whole thing back into your system, update without install and burn another DVD.
nik
Although I would like to add, just be careful when doing something like this, if you've got some crazy mirror adress, and then goes subdirectories and ... you can easily step over the longest path restriction in Windows for cd burning.
ldigas
A: 

There's now a tool, called "pmcyg", for building a self-contained off-line Cygwin distribution from a user-supplied list of packages. The tool will download all the selected packages, together with any that they depend on and the Cygwin installer program, to create a directory tree that can be directly burned onto a DVD. pmcyg and is available via SourceForge.net.