Linux is calling

I want to find out if Asterisk is a solution to cut our notorious high phone bill (our here means: my business partners all over SE Asia and Europe and me). So I got a new hard disk and downloaded the SUSE 9.1 Boot CD from Germany (the local mirror was off-line when I tried). The installation seemed quite straight forward. As before my network card wasn't recognized (seems to be a "feature" when you have the boot CD only). The card wasn't listed either. So I picked one that sounded related and it worked. Since I'm curious what 9.1 can offer I selected everything to be installed and picked FTP installation from the SUSE FTP server (which is located in Franconia, a province of Bavaria, Germany). It turns out, that this is a stress-test on my broad band connection.
I started the installation this morning 07:30am (before bringing the kids to kindergarten and going to work) and now 23:00 installation has completed just 61%. So the whole exercise will take about 24h. Lesson learned: wait until the local mirror is back. Still it is amazing how data transmission has changed. It seems just yesterday to me when we used 300 Baud Modems and Kermit and got all exited if we managed to transfer a 10kB file.