Here is an archive of the bitcoin block database, for new users who do not wish to wait hours for their bitcoin to be usable:
BTW, thanks for providing this service. I thought it was on the official distribution and I do recall some earlier efforts to distribute these blocks in other ways. Hopefully your act here will prompt it to be put onto the "official" download pages.
I'm running 32-bit Ubuntu Linux on this computer and it seems to be running just fine. About what block # was that block file from? It was pretty fresh stuff there.