On 05/14/2008 11:42 AM, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
I'm having trouble updating Etch: I get various errors during the update phase of aptitude. Sometimes its just "some files failed to download"; I guess it timed out or something. I'm on dialup. How to prevent absolute timeouts but allow (encourage) aptitude to re-issue requests.Sometimes I get gpg errors.Last time, I get "Bizarre Error: file size not what the server reported". I'm using the same mirror I always have: ftp3.nrc.ca I'll keep trying. Doug.
Perhaps you can use a slightly different procedure since your dialup is having problems. You can use "apt-get --print-uris upgrade" to get a list of URLs to download, and you can use wget to get the actual files. After the files MD5 sums are checked (how?), they can be placed in /var/cache/apt/archives. Wget can be told to retry and retry; it can also be told to continue failed downloads.
Think of this as untested pseudocode for the first part of the process: mkdir /tmp/getem && ch /tmp/getem sudo apt-get --print-uris upgrade > getem.list wget --input-file=getem.list --tries=100 --continueAlso, although this is probably not an option in your case, I often use apt-zip to help me update two computers that are not connected to the Internet.
Good luck.