Online Repository [Ubuntu] in DVDs

Whenever I think about installing Ubuntu (or any distribution for that matter) for friends who doesn't have high speed internet connection (yeah, there are people who exists these days without high band width internet connection), one thing always holds me back resulting on either picking up their system to my home for performing the complete installation or abandoning installing GNU/Linux in their systems.

It's about the additional repositories that I require in order to complete the installation (complete in the sense - Restricted drivers, restricted codecs, etc). I was hunting for repository download options for a long before I end up these articles:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=352460

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3060394&postcount=49

However, though having 2Mbps internet connection which is capable of downloading at the rate of 250KB/ps, I still end up with Server Time Out due to the size of repository (the main repository is close to 10GiB in size). While this annoyed me to greater extend, I came across the following tool which was said to give answer to my problem.

http://aptoncd.sourceforge.net/

While this utility works better than the repository download, the problem with this utility is that it's not meant to take the entire repository to the local hard drive. Until yesterday I was left with frustrations and then I came across the below FTP link to ubuntu repositories. It's an FTP with the entire repository downloaded, split and made as separate ISO dvds (5 in total). Though I am not sure about the availability of repository collection for other distributions (RedHat, Novell, openSUSE, etc), use the below link in order to start downloading the ISO DVds of Ubuntu online repository.

ftp://tuma.ui.edu/pub/­ubuntu-repository/gutsy/

I will let you know about the reliability of these DVDs (correctness) in days since I am going to a friends' place and then possibly to another friends' office for Ubuntu installation for which I have planned to use the repository dvds.

Leave comment if something didn't work during installations. Though I haven't checked it yet, I believe that vlc is not there in that pack. You may have to download .deb files of vlc and related libdvdcss* files along with the repo backups. Let me know your experience with the DVDs. Also, you can contribute the collection by providing .deb files which are not in their list.

Note: I have learned that the FTP I have specified above is part of Ubuntu community project in Indonesia (I thought it's Thailand btw), thanks tempeman for letting me know about it.