I'm trying to install Ubuntu 12.10 from a DVD onto a very fast desktop. My first installation attempt was very slow, taking over an hour for the "Copying files..." stage. Then it seemed to stall completely when downloading updates. After it sat on the same step for a very long time I pulled the plug to start fresh.
Now I am trying again; this time with the checkbox about installing package update UNCHECKED (since that seemed to be the straw that broke the camel's back last time). Again, the "Copying files..." stage is taking a very, very long time considering the speed of this desktop (including SSD).
I expanded the console to try to find some clue about what's going on, but there's nothing useful there. No errors, just what seems like normal commands that are spaced way too far apart in time.
Feb 7 21:07:05 ubuntu install.py: keeping language packs for: en_US.UTF-8
Feb 7 21:17:01 ubuntu CRON[17922]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly)
From 21:07 to 21:17, the only command shown is "keeping language packs"?!
I don't know exactly what to ask, except:
Why is 12.10 installation from a live DVD so, so, so slow on a fast desktop?
Update
Additionally, while stalled, there seems to be nothing happening, including no DVD spinning.
Update 2
The second installation was just as slow as the first, despite skipping the update-packages step. I allowed it to finish and after the 2.5-3 hour install time things are working. After installation I began to have other problems like very slow 'apt-get update's and an extremely slow untar that took ~5-6 hours to extract a 16GB gzipped tar with default compression. More research has led me to worry that these problems may be caused by my SSD (Plextor PX-256M3) and/or EXT4's interaction with it. For reference, I previously had 12.04 installed using BTRFS (which had it's own host of insane problems). I tweaked several recommended SSD settings, including adding "discard" to /etc/fstab as well as the line
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
and adding to cron.daily:
sudo fstrim -v /
My next step is to upgrade the firmware for my SSD...
Update 3
After upgrading my SSD firmware I've still had lots of slowness related to disk activity. I decided to re-install after a week of painfully slow use and ran into the same problems again during installation. This time, I tried several different things including:
- Install 12.10 32-bit from live DVD, with btrfs again (which worked well before my recent installations)
- Install 12.04.2 32-bit from live DVD, with btrfs
- Install 12.04.2 32-bit from USB disk image, with ext4
All of these failed. Hard. Insanely slow installs (I let the latest attempt of 12.04.2 32-bit go all night and it was 2/3 done) with nothing happening on the DVD drive or the USB drive.
Resolution
After trying so many variations of things I was beginning to lose hope, but it struck me that all of my attempts had been with 32-bit Ubuntu. I downloaded the ISO for 12.04.2 64-bit this morning and it installed (with ext4) in less than 5 minutes, including downloading updates and third-party packages! Performance is great again and all is well.
