Racing snails (part 3)

[mdlbear]

... and of course it doesn't bother to check for software updates after you install the upgrade. It's already connected... how hard can it be? Debian, as usual, has been doing this all along. And I had to check for updates yet again in order to get Java 1.5.

The Bear is not impressed.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Neither is this one.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Try downloading Debian without a fast net connection sometime; even low-end DSL isn't enough.

Thanks to Autodesk, however, this is all academic; I'll probably have to buy Windows one of these days. Blah.

[mdlbear]

Done that. And I have a low-end DSL line, which is why I set up my mirror. If you start with a fully-loaded (and sufficiently recent, to avoid massive security updates) install CD instead of just the net install, you can get a pretty useable system.

The Mac installed from a DVD, and then required nearly an hour's worth of downloading over a T1.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Apple does pile on the updates (and iPod software is included, whoop-de-do). On the other hand, it probably took you more than an hour to set up your Debian mirror, so maybe it's not so bad; my experiences with Linux have been that the amount of time to get a system to anything useful is so long that, after a while, just purchasing Mac OS doesn't seem so bad.

[mdlbear]

About an hour's worth of configuration followed by an over-the-weekend marathon rsync (at work). Sometime later I took a copy of the archive home in a USB-attached hard drive.

I actually had a legitimate reason for it at work -- I had to do updates on a system that wasn't allowed web access through the firewall. But it's easy to get addicted.

Before the mirror, I would speed up installs by copying /var/cache/apt/archives from a fully-configured system, which worked just as well but wasn't quite as convenient.