Think twice before tossing those old CDs.
Posted on August 13, 2006
5 Comments
Last week I went on a tear and cleaned my desk. In the process, I looked at stacks of burned ISOs and… pitched ‘em with the logic that if I really need them again, I’ll just re-download and burn.
Last night I wanted to install tsclient on my little xubuntu laptop. I’ve found that this little thing makes a GREAT little rdp client to work — and I wouldn’t mind a nice GUI frontend to rdesktop. So, I dutifully type
sudo apt-get install tsclient
let it churn and suddenly am looking at
Media change: please insert the disc labeled
‘Xubuntu 6.0.6 _Dapper Drake_ - Release i386 (20060601′
in the drive ‘/cdrom/’ and press enter
um… DOH! That CD was in the pile of what I pitched last week. Ah well, nothing for it but to get a download going. Started it and went to bed. Checked this morning to see it had timed out at 400MB. Crap.
Started again and it timed out at 200MB. Nuts.
Ok, logged into my web host’s shell account and “lynx’d” it down to there. Then FTP’d to the host and… marveled at the 15 mb/s cap. Gah!
ROFL, what a comedy of errors this has become. So now I have a torrent and another ftp going and will just see which actually finishes.
Tags: iso, linux, rdesktop, tsclient, xubuntu
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5 Responses to “Think twice before tossing those old CDs.”
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Can’t apt be configured to pull packages directly from a FTP/HTTP repository? This would avoid having to keep CDs around and ensure you always get the latest stuff. Check /etc/apt.conf or something like that to see if you can change this.
Well, Peter. You may be on to something there….
What I just did was commented out the cd-rom reference in my sources.list. Ran the apt-get again and, after quite a bit of downloading, I seem to now have tsclient.
And final note-to-self: when running rdesktop in full screen mode, ctrl-alt-enter to toggle in/out of that mode.
I gotta say, a P2 366 laptop (thinkpad 600e!) running xubuntu is a handy thing to have around.
Yes, that “bit of downloading” should be an initial download of package sigs and description data. That is so you can run apt-search, or something like that, to find the exact package you’re looking for in case of ambiguity.
You’re temping me to install Xubunu on my primary laptop. Since I don’t have to share a computer with Stephanie anymore, there really is no good reason I’m not running Linux. Unless laziness counts…
Heh, notice how I keep saying “or something like that”. Damn it is obvious how long it has been since I’ve been in front of a Debian-based system.