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Is there any way to know dependencies of a software before actually installing it. I don't have an Internet connection at home. Whenever I install a software most of the times the installation fails due to one or the other dependency not present in my system.
Is there any way to ensure successful installation of a software in Linux in offline mode other than previously installing all the required dependencies? I am new to Linux. Please help me out.

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Yes, there are lots of ways, but most involve the package manager for whatever flavor of linux you are using. Please tell us what linux distro you are using. – Dan Aug 27 '10 at 6:32
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it helps to tell us what distro you are referring to. maybe the answers will be more specific to your problem. – mugen kenichi Aug 27 '10 at 10:02
I am using Ubuntu. Thanks for your responses. – M LOHIT Aug 27 '10 at 12:59
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A common sense rule assumes providing info about dependencies in install instructions. That's README or INSTALL in the source code tarball of the app.

While many package managers track dependencies between packages (not all of them, for example the package manager in Slackware Linux doesn't track dependencies, and this is not definitely bad, because fighting with a package manager that is smarter than it should be can be a harder task than just resolving dependencies manually), the above mentioned files are the first place where package maintainers go when including some software into a repository.

There are many smaller tricks, like:

  • for an app written in Python (put any scripting language here), study the imports to find out external dependencies
  • for a dynamically linked binary use ldd to see what libraries it links against
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