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View Full Version : [ubuntu] scanning mirrors takes more than an hour?!?!



wellofsouls
October 7th, 2009, 08:44 AM
what in the name of God/Buddha/Allah/Confucius/etc. is it doing? when installing ubuntu, it always stops at 80% progress to "scan mirrors" and shows no sign of doing anything for one hour and more, before continuing to finish installation. :confused:

and the ironical thing is, when it's "scanning mirrors", there's actually text on the screen says that "the installation will finish soon". so it only takes less than 10 minutes from booting the live CD to showing "the installation will finish soon", and then another 70 minutes from "the installation will finish soon" to actually finishing the installation. worse as there's no progress bar change or any indication of what it is doing for those 70 minutes.

and the worst part is, after "scanning mirrors" for so long, when it actually boots into the system, the default mirror selected is usually very slow, ie. at around 5KB/s, I have to go to System -> Administration -> Software Sources and choose "Select Best Server", then somehow it can scan through the 320+ mirrors in just under two minutes and finally choose a fast server with 200KB/s speed. so what is the purpose of the one hour plus "scanning mirrors" process at the installation?

I think the installer should really improve on this part, or at least add another progress bar showing what it is doing when "scanning mirrors", instead of making the user staring at a 80% progress bar with "the installation will finish soon" for more than one hour, which is not exactly good usability... ](*,)

or maybe change the "the installation will finish soon" text into something like "this step of scanning mirrors can take anywhere from minutes to hours to finish, and after it finally finishes and boots into the system, you should go to System -> Administration -> Software Sources to choose Select Best Server, which can actually scan through the mirrors in MUCH less time and find a MUCH faster mirror in the end" #-o

earthpigg
October 7th, 2009, 08:57 AM
hi,

have you put any efforts forth to replicate this error from:

-a different ISP and router?
-a different machine?


having installed and maintained quite a few Ubuntu installs in quite a few different machines connecting to quite a few different ISPs in quite a few different nations, i have never experienced anything similar to your problem.

which kind of makes me think it is something a bit more local than "The Ubuntu Linux Operating System."

have a buddy bring his laptop over to your house, see if the problem persists.

if your computer is a laptop, take it to a neighbors house or the local coffee shop with wifi and see if it persists.