Foreign Perspectives

I’ve been weaning everyone off Windows over the past year so we’re getting into the first multi-computer upgrade of Ubuntu.

One of the problems seems to be that an Ubuntu upgrade seems to take forever if you’ve been installing bits and pieces of software over the course of the year. Of course, that’s pretty much the situation everyone is in thus it seems to be over 10 hours for everyone (my Aspire One weighed in at 15 hours).

On the other hand, a new install of 9.10 on another Aspire One took under 30 minutes although there’s another hour to download prior to the install.

Granted, there’s more software to download in an upgrade and indeed that “30 minute” install will likely end up at two or three hours counting downloading time. That’s still a long, long way short of the 10-15 hour times for upgrades though.

I’m going to see if I can speed things up somewhat for the next upgrade by copying the downloaded packages from /var/cache/apt/archives. There’s the “proper” way to do this but it sounds simpler to just copy all the .deb files and plonk them on with dpkg. Doing that should mean that I can get away with a backup, clean install and package install for the last couple of machines with the only thing remaining being setting up the Internet and email on them.