Using netselect-apt - Tip to select the fastest Debian mirror

Each time I install Debian - and I have done it scores of times on multiple machines, I get frustrated in choosing the right Debian mirror for updating the package database on my machine using 'apt-get update', or installing a new package for that matter.

Some of the questions that I had to find a solution for were ... Do I choose the Debian mirror in my country (India) or do I use one of the US servers ? Is there any way to find which of the two are the fastest for my geographic location ?

It might sound ironical, but experience tells me that the truism of choosing a Debian apt mirror closest to ones location does not hold true for me. Because at all times, when I have used a mirror from India, it is dead slow. And believe it or not, the responsiveness of the mirror will do a great deal of difference to how fast you are able to update your Debian machine.

Enter netselect-apt, a package which helps one to find and use the fastest Debian mirror for his region. What this script does in conjunction with 'netselect' command is, it first downloads a list of all the Debian apt mirrors from the official Debian website using wget. The list is saved in a file named 'mirrors_full' in your current directory. It then checks the responsiveness of each of the servers in the list and then selects the fastest among them. Finally it writes the necessary code in the sources.list file and saves it in your current directory. Considering that on last count there are a total of 248 Debian mirrors to choose from, that is a pretty tedious job.

In order to use netselect-apt, the first thing you have to do in your newly installed Debian machine is download and install the netselect-apt package. This can be done as follows :

# apt-get install netselect-apt

The netselect-apt package depends on the netselect package and so it will also be automatically installed.

You can pass a couple of options while invoking the netselect-apt command. For instance, I have Debian Etch installed on my machine. And if I want to find the fastest Debian Etch repository mirror for my geographic region, I run the netselect-apt command as follows :

# netselect-apt etch

If I want it to include non-free software section as well while creating the sources.list file, then I use the -n option :

# netselect-apt -n etch

You can also ask netselect-apt to select only ftp servers instead of http ones by passing the -f option.

# netselect-apt -n -f etch

Apart from etch, you can pass the following options - stable, testing, unstable, experimental, woody, sarge and sid. If you choose not to pass any options, then by default netselect-apt uses 'stable' as the option.

Once it finishes its work, you will find a newly created sources.list file in your current directory which will have the necessary code pointing to the fastest Debian server for your location. Now all you have to do is to copy the sources.list file to /etc/apt/ directory and do an apt-get update.

# cp ./sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list
# apt-get update

Please note that the speed of the servers change over a period of time and is dependent on a variety of external factors. So the server that netselect-apt chooses today need not be the fastest one for you say, a couple of weeks hence. So if you are in the habit of installing and updating software all the time, it will be prudent to run netselect-apt once every week or so and update your sources.list file to point to the fastest mirror.

A great collection of repositories for Open SuSE Linux

When ever I try out a GNU/Linux distribution, the one thing which hound me atleast in the initial stages is the lack of awareness about additional repositories particularly the ones which contain software packages which are necessary to make working in Linux a complete experience. So the first time I tried Red Hat, I had to scrounge the Net to get the addresses of additional repositories because the servers which hosted the Red Hat official repositories were stretched to their limits and were dead slow and more over, they did not contain non-Free software.

When I tried Ubuntu, this travail was elevated to some extent partly due to the fact that the switches for enabling additional repositories which contained non-Free software was made available in the Linux distribution itself and also partly due to help from the strong active community revolving around it.

Now Vichar Bhatt, a staunch supporter of SuSE Linux - more so for its robustness and superior features, has compiled a collection of repositories which host packages meant for the SuSE Linux distribution though he is quick to point out that installing software from unverified repositories carry a slight security risk. Nevertheless his efforts are commendable. He has also provided a list of official SuSE repositories too which can be found here. Hopefully, the list will be updated as and when new repositories are made available.

A list of Ubuntu/Kubuntu repositories

At a time when I was using Red Hat (Fedora), One of my favourite repositories was Dag-wieers not only because the official Red Hat repository was dead slow due to excess traffic but also because dag-wieers contained a number of additional RPM packages which were missing in the official repositories such as those with support for proprietary file formats. That was the culmination of my search for additional repositories to include in my Yum configuration file.

Now a days, this is not at all a problem especially when you are using Ubuntu, as the repositories have been demarcated into different sections such as Universe, Multiverse and so on depending upon the type of package available in each one of them such as whether the package is released under a free license or a proprietary one. And it is only a matter of enabling the desired repository and then using apt-get to install the requisite package. Still, it doesn't hurt to have a number of additional repositories apart from the ones provided officially by Ubuntu. Trevino has compiled an exhaustive collection of repositories for Ubuntu and Kubuntu which you can include in your /etc/apt/sources.list file. A word of caution is in order though, which is that since these are unofficial repositories, it is difficult to verify the integrity of the packages. So use at your own risk.