[ubuntu-za] Silly question

[Jonathan Hitchcock]

Hi Ewald,

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 3:22 PM, Ewald Horn<ewaldhorn at gmail.com> wrote:
> I need to ask a silly question, and would gladly accept grunts and
> points to a "read this entry in this manual you nitwit" as I'm a bit
> lost here...

Your first and only mistake was putting "silly question" in the
subject line and telling us in your first paragraph that you were
about to ask a "silly question".  Nobody wants to hear silly
questions, so that's just begging people to stop reading.
Fortunately, this is a friendly list, and nobody is going to call you
a nitwit ;-)

(Also, your question is far from silly, it's a very good one, in fact.)

> Anyone know where to point me to get an offline VLC package ? I found
> someone who listed an older version on Rapidshare, but alas, no luck
> there at the moment.

You should just be able to download the debs from
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/v/vlc/ (or from the
PPA, which is http://ppa.launchpad.net/c-korn/vlc/ubuntu/pool/main/v/vlc/
from what I can tell - you can work out the URL yourself).

Once you've downloaded the debs, you can probably just double-click on
them in your favourite file explorer, or use gdebi to open them - this
will install them and all of their dependencies.  (Another way, from
the commandline, is to do "dpkg -i filename.deb", and then "apt-get -f
install" to install the dependencies.)

The problem with doing this (and not following David's way) is that
when you get home, you might discover that there's some other deb
which you need to install as well, as a dependency, which you haven't
downloaded.  It might take you several trips before you have all the
dependencies.  David's way uses Synaptic, which knows all the
dependencies, so it will get them all in one go.