Download sizes

[owend]

Hi, I'm new to LMDE, although I've been Mint 8 - 9 - 10 as my only OS for some years and well satisfied. I took the plunge and downloaded LMDE 64-bit: 974Mb! It needed an update - another 335Mb. It immediately found it needed another 126Mb of updates, so 1.4Gb in two days. I haven't started migrating my data files or getting any new programs (such as my favourite timewaster, GoogleEarth!).

My problem is I'm in rural England, I can only get 1.1Mb max speed on broadband, often less, so large downloads take a LONG time - today was the updates, took nearly three hours and at several stages it was only running at 40kbps. I appreciate LMDE is rolling, so frequent updates are likely and an acceptable price for not needing to reinstall with Mint 11 etc, but can I expect this scale regularly? If so I may have to revert to LM10, I don't have the time for the vast downloads!

What size/how often updates are others of you out there finding?

As a separate query, the startup time has stretched: I see about 5 seconds on LM10 from the login screen to a working desktop, but it's 20-23 seconds on LMDE (although I haven't done any tweaking yet). Should I be seeing so long? Both LM10 and LMDE take 23-24 seconds from Grub to the login screen, so no difference there.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[aljoriz]

Have you tried chaning the download mirrors to some place closest to your location?

How to do it?
Go to Menu >Terminal then enter this code

Code: Select all

sudo software-properties-gtk

enter your password
Look for the "Download from" and press on the tab beside it and select "Other"
Press "Select best server" once it has select a better server for you press "Choose server" then close

try to update again.

[CiaW]

In addition to changing mirrors to some place closer, I use debdelta in a terminal to reduce total download sizes. You just do an apt-get update then a debdelta-upgrade in a terminal (as root or sudo, of course...). Sometimes it doesn't save much sometimes it saves a lot. After you do the debdelta-upgrade you still have to run the apt-get dist-upgrade or use the Mint Update to download whatever didn't have a delta available and install the updates.

[owend]

Thanks, aljoriz and CiaW, I'll give both approaches a try today! How often do you find you get downloads, and how large are they?