Ubuntu Done Quick

[Vincent Trouilliez]

> How fast can Ubuntu be installed, theoretically?  It takes me about
> 45-50 minutes on an AMD64 with serial ATA hard drive; 

Huuu, I have a 3+ year old machine, no fancy 64bit CPU or SATA disk, and
the install is much quicker than this.
CPU is 1.45 Ghz (Athlon XP 1700+), disk is an old 40Gig 7200rpm 2MB
thing.
I have installed Ubuntu many times on this machine, Wart, hoary, Breezy,
and the install is as predictable as the a sunrise : 25 min from booting
the CD up to logging in to the desktop for the first time.

> In the end, what do you think the overall time would be?  20 minutes?
> Most of the time is wasted as stuff gets copied off the CD reeeeallly
> slow during install. . . .

I timed this. It takes about only 5 minutes to copy the packages to the
disk. The first phase : "installing base system" takes about 2 minutes,
then the next phase "Copying remaining packages..." takes about 3
minutes. About half of the time is spent configuring all the packages.
The fonts, locales, python and Open Office being particularly long to
set up, I find.
I am not sure how the install could be made much faster. And 25 minutes
from start to finish, is very good I find. I don't think it's worth
trying to make it quicker for the sake of it. It's just an install after
all.

--
Vince