wget is a popular and portable download tool that can run on nearly
any machine. Unlike the method above this requires that the Debian machine
already has a list of available packages.
The basic idea is to create a disc that has only the archive files downloaded
from the remote site. This is done by using the --print-uris option to apt-get
and then preparing a wget script to actually fetch the packages.
Unlike the previous technique no special configuration files are required. We
merely use the standard APT commands to generate the file list.
# apt-get dist-upgrade
[ Press no when prompted, make sure you are happy with the actions ]
# apt-get -qq --print-uris dist-upgrade > uris
# awk '{print "wget -O " $2 " " $1}' < uris > /disc/wget-script
Any command other than dist-upgrade could be used here, including
dselect-upgrade.
The /disc/wget-script file will now contain a list of wget commands to execute
in order to fetch the necessary archives. This script should be run with the
current directory as the disc's mount point so as to save the output on the
disc.
The remote machine would do something like
# cd /disc
# sh -x ./wget-script
[ wait.. ]
Once the archives are downloaded and the disc returned to the Debian machine
installation can proceed using,