Double-click installer in Ubuntu?

Question

I'm trying to update our installer so a user can simply double-click on a file and have all the dependencies and our software installed easily. This is a suite of applications that will are deployed on a clean Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) installation. I have investigated making a .deb file, but listing the dependencies doesn't work, because there isn't any Internet access available. And, any script that would set up a local APT repository would still need to be run from the command line. Is there a way to put a .deb file inside of a .deb file?

I know many companies ship shell scripts that you have to chmod +x, and then execute. This is not acceptable. It is ridiculous that this isn't possible; especially considering the distribution and architecture is fixed.

Answer 1

If you are totally confident that it will be installed on the same system every time, you can find the list of package dependencies yourself, fetch them from the Ubuntu repositories, and package them up with your software. You just have to be clear that your software is for a specific version, probably deal with things like keeping up with maintenance releases.

You can also easily install with a script. As for your complaint about making scripts executable, well, I don't know how you're shipping your product, but since you say it's going somewhere without Internet access, I assume it's going to be copied from some kind of media. If you make the script executable when you put it on that media, you're done.

If you'd like to do this using packages, you can create a CD-ROM which contains a package repository. You can find all kinds of information on this with Google Search. For starters, try this - it's a GUI for doing it. http://aptoncd.sourceforge.net/