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I have this system that has a basic Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS installation on it, but no network access. I have this set of deb packages which have been copied to some location on said machine. How do I get dpkg and/or apt to recognise these packages as available?

I thought $ sudo dpkg --recursive --record-avail would do it, and it does see each package and reports "Recorded info about …" for each one, but later attempts to $ sudo apt-get install or $ sudo dpkg -i fail just as before the 'record-avail'. I think I'm close but missing something.

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  • Have a look at some of the options here: askubuntu.com/questions/974/…
    – muru
    Jul 25, 2014 at 12:18
  • @muru: A very useful question page indeed. After a fair amount of work on my part, apt-offline turned out to be what I needed.
    – Urhixidur
    Jul 30, 2014 at 20:02
  • Ah, sorry if it was a lot of trouble, I figured one of those answers would apply closely to you case. Could you add an answer here for the benefit of future users, considering it took a bit of work?
    – muru
    Jul 30, 2014 at 20:05
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    Don't misunderstand me: your suggestion was spot on. Using apt-offline to get the list of missing dependencies for any given package is the first, crucial step in installing said package, whether one is making a partial local repository or feeding apt's cache directly. The main problem I ran into was that, in the absence of any files in /var/lib/apt/lists to start with, both apt and apt-offline conk out without yielding any useful error messages. If anyone thinks it may be useful, I could expand the answer to detail the steps one must follow.
    – Urhixidur
    Jul 31, 2014 at 13:24

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It turns out one must first copy the repository descriptors (Packages, Sources, Release, Release.gpg, Index, Translation-en) to /var/lib/apt/lists. Start by installing apt-offline, which has very few dependencies (I was starting from a command-line Ubuntu installation). Once the repository descriptors are in place, both apt-offline and apt become workable.

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