Installing applications without internet connection...possible?
 

I have an old IBM laptop I turned into a picture frame. 128MB ram, IDE-to-CompactFlash adaptor, 1GB compactflash card.

I want the system to boot straight into a slideshow of pictures. I can do this with a startup script and the program 'feh' which takes nice commandline options.

So I installed DSL to the compact flash card and the system works great. I had planned on enabling apt and just apt-get'ing feh.

The problem I now have is that this machine doesn't have an ethernet port.

I didn't realize this till now, because I don't just go looking for internet ports on computers, but I think this thing had a docking station originally, and the ethernet port was on that. I have a USB port and CD drive though. And I DO have a CF-USB adapter. So here's what I'm thinking

1. Boot into DSL on CF card using my main desktop. Enable apt. Run apt-get install feh. Transfer card back to laptop, boot, feh works, live happily ever after. I have no idea if this would work.

2. Use my main system some other way to compile feh onto the CF card in such a way that it will work on the laptop. I will need help with this because I'm not smart with linux, I just know ubuntu and apt-get.

Is number 1 possible? If not, is number 2 possible, and if so, how do I do it?

Have a look at 'apt-zip' - maybe DSL already has it:

apt-cache search apt-zip

It creates a 'wget' script (and maybe a few others) so that you can use removable storage to download package list updates, packages, etc on a computer with internet access. (Presumably you can also run the scripts on WinDuhs after spending hours installing the necessary tools.)

Alternatively, set up ppp over the serial port and get an internet connection without ethernet; 115kbps should be fast enough for the laptop.

Yes, you can install everything you need onto a Compact Flash card using one computer and then booting your non-ethernet-enabled computer with that.

I would, however, offer the friendly suggestion of turning the software you want to use into a .dsl extension via the deb2dsl application. That way it will be much more portable and more easy to reinstall should something ever happen to the copy of DSL you have on the Compact Flash card.