old machine wheezy vs apt

[Aleksandar Kostadinov <akostadinov@gmail.com>]

Hello,

trying to make a print server from an old pentium 100 64M RAM. I had
to take that route because the USB<->parallel cables I've got don't
work. Anyways, first tried to install debian stable but it crashes on
boot. Something with the IDE controllers. btw I think there are some
nasty bugs with stable kernel because it crashes on a Intel core duo
laptop for other reasons. Anyways newer and older kernels work just
fine on these machines. So I went ahead and installed wheezy on the
machine (had to remove the vga=788 and quiet options, otherwise I
can't see the installer).

Now the problem is that I can't install anything more on that machine
because apt-get update takes forever. It downloads package index from
the mirror but "reading package lists" step is so slow I'm not sure it
will ever complete. First 11% complete in a reasonable time but then
it seems it becomes slower as work progresses.

My question is how can I speed up the process or somehow limit the
package lists so apt completes in a reasonable time? The only thing I
have in sources.list is wheezy main repo. Is there any way to further
limit the number of packages?

Thank you in advance!