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I have a Lucid Server (10.04) set up and I would like to change the mirror from US (or any other country) to the Main Ubuntu Mirror.

For example my two first entries in sources.list are:

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid main restricted
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid main restricted

In a Desktop environment I would select the main mirror like this:

Software Sources

But how do I do that from the terminal as I don't have a graphical environment installed!

4 Answers 4

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Open your sources.list file using your favorite text editor, e.g.

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Locate the text http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu and replace it with http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu.

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  • I've figured this would do the trick but when I did as you suggested but it gave me a 404 error for the repository. I've checked again now and it seems to be okay. It seemed to be a problem with my network connection. Thank you very much for the answer. Feb 16, 2012 at 11:10
  • is there a secure way like with the GUI. I mean, not replacing it manually and avoiding typos or whatever.
    – logoff
    Jan 10, 2014 at 11:24
  • Maybe something like this: askubuntu.com/questions/20414/… @logoff Feb 28, 2014 at 0:39
  • 2
    Also run apt-get update subsequently so that APT can update its packages. Initially I got an Package X has no installation candidate message because APT hasn't yet scanned the new repository for packages.
    – dutoitns
    Nov 22, 2016 at 9:00
  • To use it in a script the following sed command can be used sed -E -i 's#http://[^\s]*archive\.ubuntu\.com/ubuntu#http://be.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu#g' /etc/apt/sources.list' /etc/apt/sources.list replace nl with your country code. Sep 6, 2019 at 9:55
89

This command should do the trick:

sudo sed -i 's|http://us.|http://|g' /etc/apt/sources.list

It will remove the 'us.' prefix in each of the addresses to convert them to addresses of the main server.

Of course replace 'us' by any other mirror you are using.

In depth explanation of command:

sed - stream editor for filtering and transforming text.

  • The -i argument is to edit a file in place.

  • Then 's|regexp|replacement|g', s specifying the search and replace command.

  • The g at the end being the argument to "globally" search.

  • Conclusion: replaces all occurrences of http://us. with http:// in the file /etc/apt/sources.list.

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  • 1
    Try explaining the command a little more, what does it do? Dec 10, 2014 at 13:41
  • 3
    To switch from us to de mirror do the following: sudo sed -i 's/http:\/\/us./http:\/\/de./g' /etc/apt/sources.list'
    – Christian
    Feb 17, 2017 at 14:21
  • 1
    The method posted here is right, however the code posted in the top is wrong [code] "sudo sed -i 's/http:\/\/us./http:\/\//g' /etc/apt/sources.list"[/code] where are the sed cmd posted at the bottom makes sense.
    – SAGAR Nair
    Mar 8, 2018 at 23:56
  • 1
    Thanks a lot for the manual-text-editing-free one-liner. I went from a few kB/s download speed to 10 MB/s by using sudo sed -i 's|http://us.|http://ch.|g' /etc/apt/sources.list (I'm in Switzerland). I was working with an osboxes image and they are apparently quite misconfigured in that regard...
    – masterxilo
    Nov 14, 2018 at 9:13
  • ok, this works good. I tried it on my ubuntu linode server. Nov 16, 2022 at 9:47
7

Correct sed usage to remove/change country code "us" from source.list to something else like "au", the command will be as follows:

sed -i 's/http:\/\/us./http:\/\/au./g' /etc/apt/sources.list

or just to remove "us" alone instead of changing it to something, use code below:

sed -i 's/http:\/\/in./http:\/\//g' /etc/apt/sources.list
4

With vim:

mv /etc/apt/sources.list{,.bak}   # you may want to make a backup
vim /etc/apt/source.list

Type : (you need to hold Shift) to enter command-ine mode, and then type:

%s/http:\/\/us\./http:\/\//g

Hit Enter

Hit Esc to be sure you've exited the command-line mode and entered normal mode. Now you can scroll around the file with keyboard move keys (if you want) to make sure all occurrences of us mirrors have been edited.

Finally, exit with saving by entering command-line mode (type :) and enter wq! to save and exit vim.

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