Hi,
I have just completed a cygwin install, which seemed to take an
extraordinary length of time, so I started googling and found the article
"Setup 1.7.11 texlive postinstall takes 6+ hours". Ken Brown's response to
that post was hopeful, but may have underestimated the scope of the
problem, putting it down to "something else going on with your system,
maybe having to do with your VM." My installation was on a laptop, not a
VM, and while I wouldn't claim that it's a powerful machine, I'm still
very surprised at the install time. I also think it remarkable that most
(something like 90%) of the install time was spent in the texlive
postinstall phase; so in other words, most of the install ran at an
acceptable speed (~16 mins to get to the start of the postinstall phase-
not too bad for a slow laptop) but the first texlive task
("/etc/postinstall/texlive-collection-basic.sh") then took 25 mins- more
than the rest of the install up to that point.
So, I would say to Ken Brown- "Keep up the good work"- but please consider
raising its priority! At the time of writing you had fixed 29 postinstall