hello :))
I have problems with the WiFi adapter on my new pc, and in order to troubleshoot I need to use some utils that are not on already on the computer.
is it possible to just copy the binaries from a computer with internet connection onto a usb drive and move them over that way ?
And in that case, how do I make sure to also copy all the dependencies ?
or is there a smarter way do to it all together ? 😅
I hope this is the right community for this question :)) I couldn’t find any community specifically for Linux tech support.
depending on the distro you could use a .deb or .tar.gz instead of binaries and then install it with your package manager
Alternatively, you can use you phone to USB-tether? Or if you’re on NixOS or Guix, where binaries stop working, you can build a custom ISO image with the necessarily tools already available.
If you have an android phone, you can plug it in via USB and enable USB Internet tethering, which will give you working internet access on your machine to do the Wi-Fi debugging with.
When I had no (useful) Internet where I was living a few years ago I would save a list of packages to download from Synaptic to a drive and then when I was somewhere I could I would download them, then when I got home I could plug in the drive and update/install them.
In general, no. Better way is to download packages with that tools from your distro repository, transfer them via flash key and install. You also have to download dependencies, but CLI tools usually have few of them and there are good chances they are already installed.
If the package manager on your old PC is keeping copies of everything it installs, just copy all of those packages over and go through the package manager on the new PC. Look under /var/cache
Depends on the tools. If they’re statically compiled, it should be fine. If they aren’t, it might still be fine if the distro and versions are similar. But what you want is statically compiled binaries.
It’ll need to be the same architecture (ARM -> ARM good, AMD -> ARM bad), and check each tool on your working computer with
ldd; the fewer lib dependencies, the better.Scripting languages are probably not worth messing with. Even if you have a running interpreter on the broken machine, scripting languages tend to lean heavily on third party libs, which may not be installed. The exception are ba/sh scripts, which have a good chance of using only commonly installed commands (why else use bash?).