Using apt-fast to speed up Ubuntu installs

When setting up your Ubuntu system and installing lots of programs, you might want to consider using this really neat utility called apt-fast. It gets your download from multiple sources to increase your download speed and therefore speed up the install process, best of all it supports the upgrade and dist-upgrade options!

Here is the homepage : http://www.mattparnell.com/projects/apt-fast-and-axel-roughly-26x-faster-apt-get-installations-and-upgrades.html

Using Ubuntu, just drop to a command line and do the following...

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tldm217/tahutek.net

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install apt-fast

Now when you install just use apt-fast instead of apt-get and you should see a big improvement.

Scott

I just set up my netbook with 10.10 server edition, LXDE and cairo-dock, all I had to do to make it just right for me was remove lxpanel and pcmanfm. Now I have a nice clean desktop without all the extra crap installed I will never need. The only thing missing was a wallpaper changer, so I threw together a little script to display a random one. Be sure you have FEH installed and are not using pcmanfm to manage your desktop. Just save it somewhere, chmod +x it, and add it to ~/.bashrc (I start a terminal at login) with a & at the end of the line and you are good to go.

#change wallpaper randomly

#by scott goodgame 2010

#! /bin/bash

WALLPAPER_DIRECTORY=~/DesktopStuff/wallpaper

INTERVAL=300 # number of seconds to keep each wallpaper

FILES=($WALLPAPER_DIRECTORY/*)

while true; do

feh --bg-fill ${FILES[RANDOM%${#FILES[@]} ]}

sleep $INTERVAL

done

Irvverter in Ubuntu 10.10 Meerkat

My favorite conversion software for my ematic mp3/video player, iriverter, dosent work when installed from the repository. Here is how to install it..

Go to http://iriverter.thestaticvoid.com/ and download the latest version.

Drop to a command prompt and change to the directory you downloaded it to, then type sudo /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/bin/javaws iriverter.jnlp

Enjoy

Scott