You may have noticed that the default installation of Ubuntu doesn’t get your full speed on downloads when updating. This is down to the fact every installation of Ubuntu comes with the main Ubuntu APT repository set as default, and those servers can get overcrowded with the amount of people out there running a default installation.
Ubuntu has a handy method for choosing a mirror thats closer to you and can be implemented with one command. You simply have to prefix ‘archive.ubuntu.com’ with your country code in /etc/apt/sources.list. For the UK this would be like so (all on one line):
sudo sed -i -e 's/\/archive.ubuntu.com/\/uk.archive.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
Of course, for other countries please replace ‘uk’ in the example above with your local country code: eg ‘br.archive.ubuntu.com’ for brazil, ‘us.archive.ubuntu.com’ for USA etc.
Once replaced you can run the update command to pull in the packages from your new local, faster mirror
sudo apt-get update
Hope you find this useful
[...] assuming you already have your Ubuntu installation up and running. First I ensure that I am using a fast APT-GET mirror and that the system is up to date. To get updated, bring up a command shell [...]