I've recently convinced a friend that rather than splurge on a new mac mini to replace his 1 year old (!) windows box, he should try linux first. I'll be travelling in from out of town in a couple weeks to set it up for him.

I currently use suse 9.1 personal that I upgraded to professional via ftp, which is what I intend to use for him. But right now he doesn't have internet access, and I don't have access to a dvd burner. So I need a way to get the extra packages installed from a local source.

I've searched the forums, and haven't found a clear answer to this, so here are the 3 particular things I want to do:

1. Download the entire 9.1 professional package directory from ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.1 and burn the contents to cds (just the files, not an image). Then after installing the personal version on the machine, move the files onto the hard drive, maintaining the file structure, and using yast to point to the copied directory, install the extra packages directly from the hard drive.

2 & 3. The same as above, but for updates and kde 3.4, copying the ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/update/9.1/ and ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/KDE/update_for_9.1/yast-source/ directories into their own folders, and pointing online update and yast respectively to install them.

First off, I don't know if using the same hard drive as the source and destination would cause any problems. If it is possible, should I create a separate partition just for those directories? I'm also uncertain if the directory path for the updates is correct.

Any advice is appreciated.

Since nobody answered this thread, I was getting curious and tried it myself. It works!

What you need to do is:

case 1: from the SUSE FTP server, download the folder named 9.1 to your local HDD. It can be the same partition as your system. You may skip the subfolders docu, dosutils and suse/src, since they do not contain data that can be installed with YaST. In YaST -> Change Source of Installation, add a local source pointing to this directory. Now you can install from your local HDD.

case 2: same as above, you need to download only the tree below 'yast-source'

Thanks for the help! I was going to go ahead and give it a shot this weekend, and post the results. I'll probably do it anyway just to make sure everything runs smoothly, but it's good to know I'm not wasting my time.