8

Have been using apt-fast for a while now and really liking it. In case you don't know it is useful to speed up apt-get. However, I have a few questions regarding apt-fast:

  1. I would like to make any call to apt-get run apt-fast. I'm assuming I can put a script called "apt-get" in my ~/bin folder that executes apt-fast... so maybe I'm answering my own question on this first one.

    Would a script like this work?

    #!/bin/bash
exec apt-fast $@
exit 0

  2. apt-fast does not seem to speed up the very thing I wish it sped up most - apt-get update

    I would like apt-fast to make apt-get update run faster. Is this possible?

Anwar
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Joshua Robison
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  • why you want to run apt-get instead of apt-fast, apt-fast has only 1 char more than apt-get – Anwar Jul 27 '12 at 14:55
  • hmm. I'm hoping this question doesn't get off topic. But I will say that I prefer apt-fast because it is faster when downloading binaries. I'm concerned that it doesn't speed up the apt-cache apt-get update calls though. – Joshua Robison Jul 27 '12 at 14:57
  • My script I wrote above does seem to work without any trouble. Still want to know if apt-fast speeds up "apt-fast update" or if I can do anything to download the apt-get update information in threads – Joshua Robison Jul 27 '12 at 14:58
  • How did you conclude that apt-fast doesn't speed up the update and just speeds up getting binaries? (I use apt-fast as well.) –  Jul 27 '12 at 15:17
  • I'm concluding that for two reasons. 1) apt-get update and apt-fast update don't seem to be any different in speed at all from my overall feeling. and 2) the apt-fast install interface and apt-fast update interface are different. Apt-fast install actually gives me feedout of how things are being sped up ... it looks way different from apt-get install. but apt-fast update just gives me the same visually as apt-get update. Does anyone actually know that anything different is going on with updates? – Joshua Robison Jul 27 '12 at 15:38
  • You could consider asking here or here. –  Jul 27 '12 at 17:03
  • As written in the iloveubuntu comment, I will look at it to also speedup update of package list. apt-fast is a simple shellscript wrapper so tuning of apt-cache command would require some low level changes (directly in APT project). But that is not the design of apt-fast. – Lasall Jul 28 '12 at 00:06
  • Hey @Lasall, thank you. Anyways. apt-fast was an awesome idea and it works really great for speeding up package downloads so I'm a very happy user. Much appreciation to you. – Joshua Robison Jul 28 '12 at 13:23

2 Answers2

10

You can create an alias for apt-get in your home directory. To do so, follow these:

  1. Open a terminal and do this command:

    touch ~/.bash_aliases; gedit ~/.bash_aliases

  2. In the new opened file, type these and save and exit.

    alias apt-get='apt-fast'

Then, whenever you run apt-get, apt-fast will run instead

For more info, see this page

Anwar
  • 76,649
5

apt-fast does not make 'apt-get update' faster. If you'll check the code, e.g. 

vi /usr/bin/apt-fast

You'll find the line: 

if echo "$@" | grep -q "upgrade\|install\|dist-upgrade"; then
...
else
apt-get "@"

Which means that apt-fast does nothing in all other commands except in upgrade, install, and dist-upgrade.

Joshua Robison
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Majal
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    thank you. but very sad news. I really wish it would speed update up as well. I hate having to wait for all the PPA repos to download when doing apt-get update. it takes forever. – Joshua Robison Nov 24 '12 at 12:47