Request low-bandwidth Distro recommendation

[MoebusNet]

My landlord provides free wireless internet (Yay!) but has it throttled down to ~20kbs (Boo!). What Distro would be best suited to handle the glacial download speeds I suffer with?

[conradin]

your land lord is a jerk. Your looking at lousy dial-up speed. You might as well just go get your own service. Changing distro wont help very much esp if you want to view flash, images, or any other modern web content. There is allways text based interwebs, but do you really want to do that?

[earthpigg]

get the five dvd set (http://www.debian.org/CD/http-ftp/#stable) of debian stable. download them at a buddies house, or order them online. the second set of links, select your architecture.

with those five dvd's, you will the entire debian stable repository.

it looks like those five .iso files were last updated on 31 jan 2010, so presumably the only updates you will have are those pushed since then -- and that should only be security patches, if i understand debian's way of doing things correctly.

[chrisxuk]

Like what has been previously said, you'd be better ordering a disk with a Linux OS on!

Have a look here for how to order a disk of Ubuntu - http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/purchase

[earthpigg]

i'd def suggest debian stable full over ubuntu. every time you want to install a new app with ubuntu, you will need to download the entire package at 20kb/s. with debian stable full, you just pop in a dvd.

[Seq]

As far as system support go, Fedora has differential updates, though not by default. I don't think anything like that has made it to dpkg yet.

You web experience will suck regardless, Distro or operating system will not help. Opera has a proxy service you could look into that compresses images and pages. It is targetted at mobile devices, but might be available for their desktop browser. That might help a bit.

Alternatively, try making friends with somebody who raises pidgeons (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html). Also, say 'Hi' to 1997. :p

[madjr]

whats so wrong with 20kb ? and for free

i had 30kb and was fine with it

now i have 60kb, but if i had to go back is not the end of the world

sure you can't distro hop every few days but is not so bad once you get used to.

the DVD repos is good idea, plenty of places sell em

save em bucks till you can afford better

[earthpigg]

+1 to opera - as i recall, their data compression service is also available on the desktop. for free.

regardless of which distro you pick, consider disabling all but security updates.

[MoebusNet]

Thanks for the recommendations. :) I would buy broadband, but 1) it's not available in many of the places I live (full-time RV) 2) cellular broadband requires Windows to activate/update wireless device (Windows-free since 2006!) and ATT, Verizon & Sprint all refuse to activate their own broadband devices for me.

Debian-stable may indeed be the answer; I can always Ubuntu in VBox. Thanks again.

[nikhilbhardwaj]

My landlord provides free wireless internet (Yay!) but has it throttled down to ~20kbs (Boo!). What Distro would be best suited to handle the glacial download speeds I suffer with?
hack him :)

[undecim]

There's not much you can do about slow internet speed other than leaving updates to run overnight.

If you have laptop, I would look for an internet cafe to download the distro from, or get a friend to burn a CD for you.

And once you have a distro installed, look at installing a squid server to speed up your internet browsing.

[MoebusNet]

Instead of a different distro, I finally found a cell phone I could tether with my Ubuntu notebook (HTC Incredible running Android). I'm getting ~2MB down & ~0.5 MB up, plus I can watch streaming video with the phone connected to my TV. Unlimited data plan helps but not cheap ($30 phone data + $30 tether.)