Speeding up Ubuntu installations

[Administrator]

I've decided to write this year quite often on Ubuntu, currently Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). Since I like my instructions to be reproducible I often have to reinstall Ubuntu from scratch. And because this means that I have to download over 200 MB of additional packages over a slow connection, I had decided to set up my development computer, running Windows XP, as a proxy. In the evening I decided to look into it, and it turned out to be a piece of cake to set up the Apache web server as a proxy.

[details]