Tuesday, 9 November 2010

Speeding up softwares installation in ubuntu with apt-fast

By default, we use apt-get to install the applications in the linux but it is not always that good in terms of the speed of download. So apt-fast.sh has come as an open source alternative for this purpose.

The apt-fast script from mattparnell.com is a little shellscript that increases the speed of apt-get by many times. You need to have the axel download accelerator installed, which is a simple, short process, but everything else is extremely straight forward.

So, you'll have to first install the axel download accelerator either from the ubuntu software center or by doing as below:

sudo apt-get install axel

After installing axel, just download the apt-fast shellscript from HERE. After downloading the shellscript, just do the following and you are done.

sudo cp $HOME/Downloads/apt-fast.sh /usr/bin/apt-fast
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/apt-fast

Now you can use apt-fast from the terminal to install and update the packages installed under your ubuntu installation. Hope this helps to improve your speed. :)