Debian SqueeZe Repositories

This is a good newbie thing to learn:

I was trying to update my #! and was getting EXTREMELY slow downloads.  The default ftp debian repository is in Europe, so I thought I should probably make this closer, say, in the U.S. for example.  So, how do you do that?

The debian repository that is std on #! Statler is for debian SqeeZe is listed in a file called sources.list, and it can be found from within the terminal at:

     /etc/apt/sources.list

so, you can start by changing into that directory:

     cd  /etc/apt

then

     sudo gedit sources.list


(I did this as sudo because I don't presently know how to access this file otherwise. Please feel free to comment if there is a better way to change read-only permission!)

This will provide the list of sources within the file.  I added a # in front of the currently used ftp from Europe, which is listed as:


     http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free


which I changed to:
   
     http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free


This sped things up quite a bit and I completed all updates within minutes as opposed to hours or days.   I think this wasn't obvious and is likely a very early thing one should do when installing #! in the US. It makes additional downloads and software much smoother to obtain as well.