"apt-fast and Axel: Roughly 26x Faster apt-get Installations and Upgrades Monday, 02 June 2008 Updated 12/17/2009 Since apt-fast has gotten popular due to acolades in the Ubuntu community and from mention in Linux Format, I've gotten lots of hits, and a few bugs. I believe that apt-fast is now golden, though, thanks to travisn000 on the PCLinuxOS forums. From now on, you can find the latest version "source" (it's just a shellscript) at http://www.mattparnell.com/linux/apt-fast/ ... the latest version will always be the one named "apt-fast.sh." Yes, this will work for any distro that uses apt-get, and the concept should work most of the others...it may even be as simple as removing wget and replacing it with a symlink to axel. Since I last updated this post, I have started using Archlinux, whose package manager has a system in place that allows any download manager to be used, for example."