This was just an observation of the times given by the installation programs, and the mirror I installed from was on a reiserfs, read by the installation program on the ramdisk, and written to another reiserfs.
There might be many parameters that play important parts in this setup, for instance cooker's very large duty in writing all reports to the logs. regards guran -- Mandrake Linux 8.2 Cooker kernel-2.4.12-4mdk per 200110240053
