Phillip Pi wrote:
I've done many upgrades over dial-up. It's worse when you're running Sid, because by the time you get to the end of the packages to be downloaded, Sid has changed on the mirrors and some package can no longer be found, so you have to update/upgrade all over again. Nasty.I no longer have broadband connection nor can get broadband at home ... I am forced to use dial-up with EarthLink that only goes at 3 KB/sec due to poor Verizon's phone systems. Back in Autumn of 2004, I installed Debian v3.1 with its Sarge installer. I noticed apt-get update takes forever to download (30+ minutes). ... I saw many MB to download for apt-get upgrade. It was about 255 MB would be 25+ hours nonstop (woah). EarthLink doesn't let me stay online more than 24 hours straight per connection session.
Still, with persistence, you can do it.Breaking up your download over multiple dial-up connections is not a problem. apt can handle that just fine.
Too bad about the firewall restrictions. Having an essentially mirrored Debian box at work (even in VMWare) would make things a lot easier; then you could just copy the packages from /var/cache/apt/archives to your home box, with dial-up filling in any little gaps.I do have broadband access, CD burners, and USB Flash drives/sticks (256- 512 MB) at work. Is there a way to get all these Debian packages andupgrades quickly? I do not and cannot run Debian at work due to heavy firewall restrictions (apt-get update and upgrade doesn't work well in VMware v4.5.x test).
The next best solution I see is to burn a new Testing CD every so often and take it home. Just fetch the latest weekly (http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/cd-images/debian-weekly/i386/) and burn it, take the CD home, and apt-cdrom it into your system.
Sure it is; it's just that Testing and Sid get so many new packages that dial-up is problematic. Dial-up works much better for Stable, which doesn't see so many large downloads.It looks like Debian wasn't really designed for dial-up modems