How can I install software or packages without Internet (offline).

Linux Operating System uses a system of shared libraries in which different software share same libraries for their ‘under the hood’ work. This is a really useful and powerful thing and is in accordance with the Unix theory, ”Do one thing and do it very good” (or something like this).

But this system become irritating when you are not connected to internet and need to get some software, as you can’t straight way download them for some reasons.

This happen to me sometimes as I spend most of time in my college and I don’t have a fast Internet connection to download everything in minutes.

So I needed some way to download my favorite software from Windows machines in my College and install them on my Linux machine at home. But the problem was dependencies, I could download the software but who will look after their dependencies.

So I decided giving Keryx a try. Keryx is a software developed for downloading software for your GNU/Linux machine from anywhere and from any other system.

Actually Keryx download software from Ubuntu repositories (it supports only Debian based systems for now). We can add other sources also. Here is how it works.

»   First download Keryx and extract it to your USB drive (or hard disk).
»  The archive include executable files for all Operating Systems (Linux, Windows and Mac OS X).    
          Hence it can be run on any machine. (Linux file didn’t run for me though, I had to run Windows                binary file with the help of Wine and it did work perfectly fine.)

Make a Project:

1. First we have to make a project with Keryx (don’t panic, it is very simple).
2. For this we have to run Keryx on our offline machine at home (for which you want to download software). 
3. Then choose to create a new project. What actually Keryx do is that it gathers information about your Computer, your System Architecture, Software already installed on your system, and many things.
4. Only option available for now is to create a Debian project.
   Download new software:
5. Once the project is made, you can take your USB drive (with Keryx on it) to other computer which is connected to internet.
6. Run Keryx according to the OS of the machine, and chose to open the project you made earlier (see above image).
7. When you open your project, Keryx will prompt to download latest packages. This step can be skipped, as it just updates the list of archives in this step. Just click “NO” for skipping.
8. After loading for a while, Keryx will display the list of software available in the archives of your OS (of the machine on which you made the project).
9. You can select the desired software from the list and even search for the software.
10. To add new source for downloads, there is a option in the menu bar.
11. When you have selected the software, click download. This will start downloading the software from the archives as well as the all of its dependencies.
12. Once the download has completed, you can take the USB to your computer for install.
    Install downloaded software:
13. Keryx also allows you to download software from within the Keryx window, but this didn’t work in my case. So I used synaptic to install software.
14. Start Synaptic package manager, and choose option “Add downloaded Packages”, and point to the “yourUSB/Keryx/projects/yourProjectName/packages” folder.
15. Synaptic will install all the software you downloaded (or will complain if some software didn’t download properly).

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