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Mehall

#! Die Hard

From: Scotland, Cold

Registered: 2009-01-17

Posts: 850

Website

The OTHER apt trick

Do you download many things from apt? Or often have computers with little net access, but have a high speed connection elsewhere?

Or do you just have a spare HDD lying around, and don't know what to do with it?

Apt-mirror lets you create a local mirror of any repository you wish. It is simply apt-get, but no install. It saves the files to a directory of your choice, and will update just as simply as apt-get does. (And can even do this automatically)

To mirror Intrepid you need around 30GB for main, restricted, universe and multiverse, more if you want multiple vcersions of ubuntu mirroered, and yet more if you want to mirror debian packages too. (Though most of the time you'll just be wanting to mirror any repositories in your sources.list file, and in your local mirror, you might only mirror i386 or x86_64 rather than everything)

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Ex-KDE user.
Collects old PC's (Coz he can't afford new ones =P)
Crunchbang @ Distrowatch
My Blog (updated infrequently, and on the #! Planet too.)

Liu Anshan

New Member

Registered: 2009-01-22

Posts: 9

Re: The OTHER apt trick

This looks interesting, i'll have to check this out once i get another HDD

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     how do you want to be changed because of it?
No one forces you to learn.
     You'll learn when you want to.

Mehall

#! Die Hard

From: Scotland, Cold

Registered: 2009-01-17

Posts: 850

Website

Re: The OTHER apt trick

I'm going to put it on an external drive, though an "apt-mirror" partition or separate drive would do. (You don't wanna put it on your main partition for obvious reasons: in case you re-install or change distro)

It's a great way to keep many ubuntu based machines (or debian too) up to date. you will be downloading every update there is, but it's not much.

I wouldn't advise updating the packages constantly if you have a usage cap, but if it's a slow connection you have, this is actually a great way to lighten the load, as while it's a few MB every day, it's ONLY a few MB every day.

Just have it update some time you're not using your connection, and it can allow you to have anything from the repositories quickly, rather than have to many packages slowly.

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Ex-KDE user.
Collects old PC's (Coz he can't afford new ones =P)
Crunchbang @ Distrowatch
My Blog (updated infrequently, and on the #! Planet too.)