I am trying to get apt-get working on my system. I live in China and I have tried several times to find a mirror I can access without the connection timing out.

The Chinese mirrors and those in Japan do not work, neither do the standard US ones.

I access the Internet through a proxy server in my School, and I have done an export http_proxy=http://addressort and the same for ftp. The man pages say this is sufficient and you do not need to set it in apt.conf. The Internet connection and wget work fine with this.

Thanks for looking Johnny

download apt-spy via http.
Good luck though (China :/)

I used apt-spy with these options apt-spy -s cn -d testing -p http://proxy.addressort
and found debian.cn99.com to be the fastest. It wrote out a new sources.list, but apt-get still didn`t work.

I added this to the apt.conf file even though the man page says http_proxy environment variable overrides it Acquire::http::Proxy "http://addressort"; and it all works now.

Great
Johnny

my source list
i'm from china

deb http://rarewares.org/debian/packages/unstable ./
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ sarge main
deb http://debian.cn99.com/debian/ testing main
deb-src http://debian.cn99.com/debian/ testing main

deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main