Alternate sources.list for installation?

[jwiggs]

Folks,

I'm a *long* time Linux user but new to Linux Mint. I've been using mostly Ubuntu for about the last 6 years, but I'm not at all happy with what they're doing lately with the desktop *cough*Unity*cough* and a friend suggested that Linux Mint might be the distro for me.

I pulled down a copy of the 32-bit DVD image of Lisa and tried to install it today. Everything went fine until it hit the point where it was trying to download the Language packs. 900 Minutes!!! I pulled up a browser alongside the installer, did some searching, and discovered that it was possible to skip the Language Packs, so I did. Then it started trying to download packages. 1300 Minutes!!! OK, the Skip button looks like it will still work, so I "Skip" again. A few moments later it again tries to start downloading packages. Estimate this time is about 270 minutes. So I skip again, and the installation finishes.

I bring up the newly installed box and try to install the proprietary driver for my video card -- and the download of that ONE DRIVER takes almost half an hour!

I started a terminal and ran apt-get update; it took about 15 minutes just to update the package information. Finally, I ran apt-get upgrade. After two hours of downloading, I still had less than 35% of the 200+ MB of downloads to bring my system up to date. At that point I had to leave. For all I know, it's still downloading.

Clearly, one or more of the Linux Mint repositories is either completely swamped or woefully incapable, and I have two more machines to install on. Is it possible to substitute in mirrors for the repositories to do the installation? If so, what options exist, particularly for packages.linuxmint.com?

thanks,
Jim

[MacUnkie]

I just posted a similar post with errors with language packs hang ups. Same issue. When downloading attempted language packs it hangs for hours. i too tried to skip and just like you said the other package downloads required show estimated download times of 'hours'. Hopefully who ever is maintaining this portion of the install will get some mirrors updated that work . Until then I can't test drive the new 12 "lisa" !!!

Samuel.

[DataMan]

There's several post over in the Newbie forum on the poor download speed of the Canonical Repositories.

-DataMan

[jwiggs]

There's several post over in the Newbie forum on the poor download speed of the Canonical Repositories.

-DataMan

Yes, the Canonical repository is dog-slow. Pulling acroread takes almost an hour.

I have (sort of) worked out a solution on this. Unfortunately, you can't change the sources.list file before the initial installation. I tried editing the sources.list the gets created when you boot from the install CD, but it doesn't appear to pay any attention to the edits. It seems like the installer has its sources hard-coded.

That said, you can skip the language packs download and the two attempts by the installer to download updates, then, when you reboot:

1) Log in as the initial user

2) sudo vi /etc/apt/source.list

3) Replace "http://packages.linuxmint.com/" with "http://linuxmint.mirrorcatalogs.com/packages/"

4) Replace "http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/" with "http://mirror.pnl.gov/ubuntu/"

5) Save the source.list file

6) sudo apt-get update

7) Run the Software Update tool as usual

There don't appear to be any mirrors of archive.canonical.com out there, so you're stuck with that one. But the only thing I personally pull from the Canonical repository is acroread.

best,
Jim