Taking forever - what am I doing wrong?

[Guest]

Yesterday, I installed Kubuntu 11.10, from a bootable USB thumb drive created with the installer on the live CD. I started the installer at 10:50 AM, and it finally finished at 6:30 PM (over 7 1/2 hours). I had already read elsewhere that I should not check the boxes for installing additional software or updates, so I left those boxes unchecked. As I monitored the installation, I noted that about 4+ hours of the total were spent downloading "language packs," and most fo the rest of the time was spend downloading other files (I wasn't watching constantly, obviously). The download time surprised me, since I'm on a T1 connection, and usually get about 500-700Kbps file delivery. The install was on a fairly old machine, a 2.4Ghz P4 with 2GB RAM, but I've used it as the testbed for about a dozen other Linux distros, and never seen anything like this.

As i sat there, I thought perhaps the check-boxes had been mis-labled, and I was actually getting all those downloads that I had opted not to get during the install. But, when I booted into Kubuntu this morning I found a message that 383 updates are available. :eek: I started the update 2 1/2 hours ago, and it currently says that 19% of the packages have been downloaded.

Is this normal? Not that this OS doesn't seem to be worth some waiting, of course, but I'm wondering if there are perhaps some repository changes I needed to make in the live system before doing the installation? Something else I overlooked?

[oshunluvr]

Yeah, that's way unusual. I assume you verified the downloaded ISO was the correct md5sum.

Sounds to me like one of two possibilities: your network card isn't set up right or there's a problem with your filesystem/hard drive partition. I think the first is most suspect. Start by going through your log files and looking for network errors.

[james147]

Or you have selected a slow/far away mirror

[rms]

Perhaps you've already had a previous version of Kubuntu on that partition? In that case, installation process tries to keep the software you've used and that takes some downloading and time. But as you remarked, it's worth it as it is unnecessary to set up everything anew .8)

[james147]

Perhaps you've already had a previous version of Kubuntu on that partition? In that case, installation process tries to keep the software you've used and that takes some downloading and time. But as you remarked, it's worth it as it is unnecessary to set up everything anew .8)

No, the installer deletes important system files if you don't format the drive (/etc /usr /bin etc) then does a normal install. It doesn't try to upgrade existing packages and should only download things if told to do so.

[rms]

No, the installer deletes important system files if you don't format the drive (/etc /usr /bin etc) then does a normal install. It doesn't try to upgrade existing packages and should only download things if told to do so.

I had an unsuccessful upgrade from Oneiric to Precise yesterday (somebody while I was away, it seems, turned off power while upgrade was only half-way through, grrr). Today I installed via liveCD on the same partition and it kept all my settings, themes, files... and even though I didn't have a separate usr partition!:cool: The only thing not working is one virtual machine(can't be open for whatever reason). How come?

Edit: Well, I have fixed that virtual machine(a setting went amiss) however, I did have to reinstall root actions for dolphin and changes for anyremote config files seem to be gone too. On the other hand what I've entered in xorg.conf survived. I mean you are right, I did saw the warning that all data in /etc and other directories will be erased but for some reason that didn't quite happen.

[james147]

I had an unsuccessful upgrade from Oneiric to Precise yesterday (somebody while I was away, it seems, turned off power while upgrade was only half-way through, grrr). Today I installed via liveCD on the same partition and it kept all my settings, themes, files... and even though I didn't have a separate usr partition!:cool: The only thing not working is one virtual machine(can't be open for whatever reason). How come?

It only deletes the system files, the user files (/home) are not deleted so all user settings remain.

[rms]

It only deletes the system files, the user files (/home) are not deleted so all user settings remain.

Thanks, I was resigned to the possibility that I'd have to reinstall all the software again but that, fortunately, didn't happen.