Arch, sans 'net
 

Hey all. I was wondering if anybody knew a way to install a large package, in this case KDE, with just one command, and have it install all the required packages, including dependencies. I know that in portage, you could just use something like 'emerge kde' and it would install all of the packages to get kde up and running. Is there something similar in pacman? I don't want to go through the pain of installing kdebase, kdelibs, etc... Oh, and one more catch... I don't have a 'net connection right now. But I have the entire package base (a whole Arch mirror, basically) on my hard drive. Any ideas?

man pacman or go to the documentation on the website, are you using arch yet?

Yes, I am using Arch. I couldn't find what I was looking for in the manual or Arch Wiki. All I found was HOWTO on upgrading from KDE 3.3 to KDE 3.4. I will try the man pacman as well though.

This is from the user docs same idea as what you are asking i think, except you have a dir?:

If you install from a CD and end up having a problem accessing the Internet, you may need to install additional packages from the CD. You can locate the packages on the cd and install them manually using pacman -A packagename.pkg.tar.gz Alternatively, you can temporarily set up a local repository to access the CD. Mount the CD on /mnt/cd using the command mount /mnt/cd (assuming your fstab is properly set up). Then add the following lines to your /etc/pacman.conf:

[cd]
Server = file:///mnt/cd/arch/pkg


You will then be able to install additional packages to help you get your Internet access set up.

I finally figured it out. I had to add "Server = file:///usr/archlinux" to the [current] and [extra] sections of my pacman.conf file. Now I am trying to figure out how to do something similar with ABS.