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HackToHell
Asked: 2012-11-27 17:30:26 +0800 CST

How can I extract the deb files from the ubuntu iso?

  • 772

How can I extract the deb files of ubuntu 12.10 from the official iso, I am trying to cut the download time, only some packages are in /pool/main

The rest seem to be in a virtual fs in /casper/.

How can I extract the deb files?

installation

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Most of the debs Ubuntu uses are installed into a chroot before generating the ISO image, so you can't just get them back. If you unsquash the filesystem, you'll see it looks like just a root filesystem. For example, this is a truncated view of ls:

    drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Oct 12 16:59 bin
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root  4096 Oct 12 16:59 boot
drwxr-xr-x   4 root root  4096 Oct 12 16:56 dev
drwxr-xr-x 134 root root 12288 Oct 12 16:59 etc
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Oct  9 08:59 home

    ...

    If you want to mess with the chroot, you can do so as follows:

    1. Mount the ISO

      sudo mount -o loop quantal-desktop-i386.iso tmpiso

    2. Copy the squashfs out

      cp tmpiso/q/casper/filesystem.squashfs /tmp

    3. Unsquash the filesystem

      sudo unsquashfs filesystem.squashfs

    4. This will unpack the filesystem into squashfs-root.

    5. Make your changes.
    6. Recompress with squashfs.
    7. Use ISO master to replace the filesystem.squashfs with the one you modified.
    8. Rebuild the ISO with ISO master.
    • 5
    • Mount the iso.
    • Copy squashfs and unsquash it.

    • in the extracted folder i'd execute this from the shell.

      find -name "*.deb" -type f -execdir cp {} ~/Desktop/thefolder_you_choose/ \;

      This finds all .deb files and dumps all of them (without the folder structure) in your destination folder.

    • 2