I have recently installed 8.04 Ubuntu onto an industrial board and applied the vendor kernel modifications to it. I need to develop applications on another desktop to run on this board in C++ but I am unable to install any software (specifically build-essential) on it so I am left with gcc 4.2.4 which is simply not an option as our application must be C++. I really do not know what to do here as this version is unsupported. I found this answer here Installing software on an old Ubuntu version that's no longer supported (2009 Jaunty) but unfortunately this does not help at all.
EDIT: The installation is made on a compact flash card attached to the board using USB CD-ROM drive. The vendor suggests that 9.04 and 10.04 are supported but using the ubuntu .iso installation images I have been unable to successfully install either of these successfully, hence I am stuck with 8.04.
Is there any way I can install what I want from a CD ?
Any help or suggestions would be very gratefully received as I am a software developer and not a system administrator and feeling a little out of my depth here.