Fedora Core 2 released to Mirrors, Bittorrent

tom taylor writes "Fedora Core 2 has been released to mirrors, due for public consumption on Tuesday 18th May. However, you can grab it now via BitTorrent, so get it while it's fresh! It's available in both the 4 CD or DVD versions."

Great

[arvindn]

Despite all recent negative publicity, Fedora is a great distro for the hobbyist desktop. I've been running FC1 since its release without any problems. I wish they'd stuck to 3 CDs though. IIRC, the 4th CD consists of lots of languages (and nothing else) so most people can skip it. Kernel 2.6, gnome 2.6, kde 3.2... can't wait.

Re:DVD Version?

[Anonymous Coward]

debian has a dvd version
woody is about 7 cds for the i386 binarys alone

Re:Is this the final release or test3?

[boardumb]

test3 came out at the end of April.
this is the final

The OFFICIAL torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't download a potentially hacked version of FC2 from unknown sources identified by ip numbers only.

Use the official torrent when it appears on the tracker:

http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/

Re:The OFFICIAL torrent

[Guanix]

I wouldn't worry. MD5sums signed by the Fedora project are included with the images.

oh don't be silly

[mattdm]

A minimal install of FC2 will be 500-something MB.

The "everything" install is considerably smaller than full Debian, which is amazingly (in a good way) comprehensive.

As you well know, your DOS 3.3 floppy had no applications and barely any useful tools. You can do better than that these days with a single (or, okay, probably two) floppy distro with blackbox.

Which you could *make* using Fedora, if you wanted.

Re:The OFFICIAL torrent

[mukund]

The MD5SUMs are cryptographically signed using the Fedora project's PGP key.

Re:Instead of upgrading your Fedora...

[dleifelohcs]

emerge -UD world is a very, very dangerous way to upgrade your system.

emerge -Du world is the way to be. the U implies upgradeonly, when really a bad patch could have been applied. -u keeps you at the latest and greatest version. U can very easily break your system, even if you are Johnny Careful.

Uh No!

[leerpm]

Unlike traditional P2P, Bittorrent was designed especially for purposes like this: Getting large files out to a lot of a people in a relatively short time. Mirrors simply do not scale for this, and those traditional P2P networks like eDonkey are way too slow for downloading something as large as FC.

I don't know about you, but I actually like being able to download the entire set of ISOs in under 12 hours, rather than waiting the required week for my downloads to finish like on other P2P networks.

Re:Is this the final release or test3?

[boardumb]

oh yeh just as a P.S., the official schedule is here [redhat.com]

Re:Great

[iamsure]

Not having english as your official language is one heck of a long distance away from "cannot speak one word in English".

Some googling found..

According to research by the British Council, "English has official* or special status in at least seventy-five countries with a total population of over two billion. English is spoken as a native* language by around 375 million and as a second language* by around 375 million speakers in the world. Speakers of English as a second language will soon outnumber those who speak it as a first language. Around 750 million people are believed to speak English as a foreign language

That puts the number at over 1.5 billion people able to speak "one word in english" at least.

Thats ignoring the "most computer users speak english" argument.

So yeah, I'd say for a decent number of people, CD #4 can probably be skipped.

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[kasperd]

And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file

I did when downloading FC1. Actually I had forgotten it was running and didn't terminate it until a few days later asked by a system administrator where this BT traffic was comming from. I think their strategy sounds good. The first few days a lot of people is going to download it, so bittorrent is a good choice. And by waiting a few days before opening the HTTP/FTP servers for the public, they get more people using bittorrent and have bandwidth to get it to the mirrors. Of course there will be load on the mirrors when that version is available. But as soon as the load on the mirrors start to decrease you might want to download it that way instead of through bittorrent. Anybody who wants to wait a month or longer before downloading probably isn't going to use bittorrent, but by that time there shouldn't be as much load on the mirrors. There are only two things I'm wondering about. Why doesn't Fedora include the bittorrent client? And why don't they make updates available for download with bittorrent? When a large security update is announced, it is very hard to get a connection to the server.

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[dougmc]

The other thing to understand is IT'S SLOW AS SHIT. Hardly. I regularly get 200 KB/s+ (bytes, not bits) downloads from bittorrent downloads. Right now, I'm getting 55 KB/s for FC2 -- not that fast, but then again I just started it up. I fully expect it to pass the 200 KB/s mark before it's done.

Were it not for bittorrent, I'd be getting 0 B/s -- because it wouldn't be available at all until they loaded up all the mirrors. And once they did, I'd get about 20 B/s, as they'd all be massively overloaded for a week.

Re:DVD Version?

[tokul]

you can start with 35-200 Mb version and get other packages from local mirrors.

It is possible that other distros have similar things too, but only debian talks about it on frontpage.

I've done several debian installs. None of them used official cds. Only netinstall or boot floppies.

Re:Is this the final release or test3?

[M1FCJ]

No it isn't. May 14 was the release to mirrors date. This is a part of that I understand. It's the real thing.

Depends on your configuration

[Sits]

Apparently there are some systems that yum simply can't handle because it has to update the system while it is "online" (e.g. LVM). So it looks like the answer is "it depends on your set up".

See Seth Videl's post [advogato.org] about it. My advice is to wait and see what the pitfalls are since there *will* be gotchas.

...hmm. advogato's being a bit strange today so let me post a quote:

Wrote up some not-yet-finished notes on how to yum update from FC1 to FC2 with relative ease. I'll post a link here when I'm happy. It's not a hard process and for most people it'll work fairly ok. For some people, however, for example, people using LVM, there are certain things yum just can't do, and there is no nice way around it on a running system. This is where anaconda is the only way to do it. Since it is running outside of your installed system it can muck with things w/o worrying about making its environment completely unusable.

Re:More torrents needed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm getting an average of 200k. I may have connected at a later time. If you're still not getting fast speeds, try this:

Get Bittornado. If you're getting a yellow lighty it's because you're getting torrents from a firewally. Forward TCP portys 6881-6945 to your system, disconnect, and try againy.

Indeed you haven't understood bittorrent ;p

[dmouritsendk]

The idea is that the company distributes the torrent have set up a seeder. This way, if nobody besides your are downloading, you'll still get good download rates because you are the only one accessing the primary seeder. If the primary seeder gets overloaded, it wont matter much since your btclient will download from one of the many other client downloading the file.

Think of this as a peer2peer accelerated download server, not a peer2peer network.

try giving this a look:
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/introduct ion.htm l

This scalability is the primary reason that mandrake and blizzard is using BT, chances are this why fedora is using it too.

NVIDIA

[hawkeyeMI]

Be warned! If you use the NVIDIA binary drivers, they didn't work with FC2-test3 due to the use of the 4k stack option in the kernel. Unless that's changed in the final (I doubt it) you will have to recompile the kernel to use the NVIDIA drivers.

That's all well and good for those of us that know how to do a recompile, but for Joe User it could be a bit of a hang-up.

Re:where to get bit-torrent RPM?

[Anonymous Coward]

and then looked for a bit torrent RPM for to use on my Fedora system, I learned that ... there doesn't seem to be such an RPM available.

Look harder - http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/btrpms/ [duke.edu]

Re:The OFFICIAL torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

http://fedora.redhat.com/about/security/4F2A6FD2.t xt [redhat.com]

Apparently not recommended on fedora-list

[Ars-Fartsica]

Quoted from fedora-list [redhat.com]:

For FC1 -> FC2 upgrading is NOT recommended using apt, yum or any other depsolver. Anaconda has a fair bit of magic to fix things for you. Most things are manually solvable but if you're using LVM "it has a high chance of blowing up spectacularly" according to the anaconda developers - don't bother unless you like blowing up systems :)

In any case upgrading with anaconda is the recommended way.

So it looks like they recommend getting the install disks and upgrading through the installer.

Re:DVD Version?

[mikis]

So does Gentoo.

Please read before using above torrent

[YellowBook]

Please read the following [livna.org] before using an unofficial torrent to download FC2. Apparently, the official release of FC2 is not until Tuesday, and what you are downloading may or may not be the real FC2 release (it may be a Rawhide snapshot, or a trojaned distribution, for example). You can verify the signature on the MD5SUM file to check it, of course, but you'd have to waste your time and bandwidth downloading it first.

Re:The question

[weinberg]

tettnang

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[klevin]

I've noticed that my download speed can vary rather a bit. It usually starts out quite slow and then kicks up several notches after a while. Also, you can start the official client from the command line with the "--max_upload_rate" argument. I generally set mine to "--max_upload_rate 5". I also use the "tc qdisc" command to limit the maximum outgoing bandwidth to just below my cable modem's upload limit [1].

Most cable modems use a shared pool of resources for incoming and outgoing data and are set to give preference to outgoing packets. If you're running at the maximum upstream bandwidth, your cable modem spends all of its time dealing with those packets and drops incoming data (which severly limits your incoming bandwidth). So, the "tc qdisc" command keeps multiple BT clients from hogging all of my cable modem's resources.

[1] I use `tc qdisc add dev eth0 root tbf rate 200kbit latency 50ms burst 1540`, which I got off of some webpage, don't remember which one now. It works fairly well, I just turn it off (run the command again, with "del" instead of "add") when I need to send data to another computer on my home network.

Re:NVIDIA

[Anonymous Coward]

A new nvidia driver is expected soon which will be compatible with Fedora, possibly in a few weeks. Unfortunatly when your dealing with closed source binary drivers these are the types of things that happen. I agree its not the most pleasant situation but as long as there are closed source vendors out there these types of problems will continue to come up. New users should stick with the opensource nv drivers until Nvidia makes their drivers compatible.

This again is yet another example of why binary drivers are problematic. You won't hear me say don't use them, or were better off without them. People still need these features no matter what the license. But this situation just reinforces how important having a truly free desktop is. You should be able to install your OS, get all of your hardware working, get on the Net, send and recieve email, and work on Office documents ALL with FOSS software. If proprietary closed source software is required for any of the above then the FOSS movement has failed. That's most users can't seem to grapse. Imagine 5 years from now and needing closed source drivers for every single piece of hardware. The kernel devs would be at the mercy of hardware makers and no new features could be added because they might each break some other OEMs hardware. The ONLY reason things work as well as they do now is becaus devs can fix the old code and drivers as new code and features are added to the kernel.

It can be argued that this patch was ill advised and they should have stuck with 8k for now. There I won't argue because its a valid point. I just wanted to point out that the situation wasn't as simple as "Red Hat broke Nvidia's drivers", end of story. Not that the parent was ever implying that.

Recent dicussion on the issue

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF -8 &safe=off&threadm=1UPNn-3Wt-3%40gated-at.bofh.it&r num=2&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dfedora%2520nvidia%25204k% 26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3 DN%26tab%3Dwg

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

There are no rewards - none! It's digital communism, it doesn't work.

Other BT clients will only send to you at a very slow rate if they cannot connect back to you to confirm you're sharing.

The reward you get for sharing is that your download will be like 50 times faster.

Re:Yum

[Anonymous Coward]

I've upgraded from FC1 -> FC 2 Test 3 using yum. It basically works, but there are a number of annoying details which I need to fix manually. For instance, sound still doesn't work b/c my laptop's volume keys are deactivated (prob. a 2.6 kernel problem, not a yum problem, methinks).

For people without a CD drive, this is the only way I could figure for installing FC 2. No more boot disks -- the kernel's too big!

Re:Too bad BitTorrent doesn't run on Fedora Core 1

[Oloryn]

The upgrade path would have been a bit easier if it was possible to run BitTorrent on Fedora Core 1. But you can't.

So, the bittorrent rpm that's installed on my FC1 system is just a figment of my imagination? The very bittorrent install that's currently downloading FC2? Drat!

Re:NVIDIA

[Brian Stretch]

FWIW, 64-bit Fedora doesn't require a kernel recompile to use the nVidia closed-source drivers, but you do need the driver patch from minion.de [minion.de]. You'll also need to add "alias char-major-195 nvidia" to /etc/modprobe.conf, or modprobe nvidia manually. Don't forget to make the usual changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Anyhow, I've been running 64-bit UT2004 under FC2 Test 3 for a while now and it works great, after getting the beta version mentioned here [icculus.org] (hopefully there will be an official UT2004 upgrade soon?).

It's great to see x86_64 Linux on equal footing with 32-bit x86 Linux. If you've been waiting for an excuse to switch over to AMD64, now's the time.

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[Xugumad]

Having just written a paper on BitTorrent (which should be presented at PGNET 2004 [livjm.ac.uk] if anyone cares), a couple of points:

1. About 20% of people upload at least as much as they download. Which isn't a staggering number (I expected a lot higher), but that's still a reasonable number of people.
2. eDonkey - don't know about you, but I get about 24kbit/s on eDonkey. On BitTorrent, average bandwidth available per user comes out at around 200kbit/s, although I've seen up to 8mbit/s on high-demand torrents.

Oh, and there's another interesting paper at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/pam2004 /papers/148.pdf [cam.ac.uk] that covers things like user-count dropoff.

Re:For the beta testers (FC2 Test3)

[Kevin Burtch]

I used yum as installed, unmodified, with the original RedHat/Fedora config:

[development]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - Development Tree
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu b/fedo ra/linux/core/development/$basearch/

This, when you run 'yum -y update', replaces this config with:

[base]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu b/fedo ra/linux/core/$releasever/$basearch/os/

[updates-released]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Released Updates
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com /pub/fedo ra/linux/core/updates/$releasever/$basearch/

Re:Yum

[Blarfy_Snarflepoop]

take a look here: http://linux.duke.edu/~skvidal/misc/fc1-fc2-yum-hi nts.txt

Re:DVD Version?

[BlowChunx]

Knoppix does it by using cramfs...

check

[oKilgorEo]

not sure if i'm missing something here but it looks to check out

SlavaSoft Optimizing Checksum Utility - fsum 2.5
Implemented using SlavaSoft QuickHash Library <www.slavasoft.com>
Copyright (C) SlavaSoft Inc. 1999-2003. All rights reserved.

OK MD5 FC2-i386-disc1.iso
OK MD5 FC2-i386-disc2.iso
OK MD5 FC2-i386-disc3.iso
OK MD5 FC2-i386-disc4.iso
OK MD5 FC2-i386-rescuecd.iso

Re:how does it compare to mandrake?

[Pharmboy]

A long time ago I switched from redhat to mandrake. I wonder if it's time to switch back.

I have been a RH customer for a long time, paying for RHN and all, and have found they change their support structure entirely too often. I have RH9 and Fedora 1 on a couple boxes now only because of necessity. As always, RH is a decent "generic" version, with mixed support.

I just downloaded SuSe 9.1 Live, and liked it enough to order a "hand rolled" version. If I like that, I will order their pro version on CD. As a desktop, it appears to blow away the RH versions, IMHO. It is more responsive, more intuitive and better looking. And this is from a Live CD distro. I am looking hard at SuSe to replace everything RH I have now. We will see if I like it well enough in a few weeks.

Since IBM loaned Novell the money to buy SUSE in the first place, I am betting it will end up being the best supported version for the corporate desktop in a year or two, which it lags RH on now. You can download the live CD free at suse.com and try it out. Its different, but as a RH (and formally Mandrake) user, it was nice to fire it up and have everything respond much faster.

Re:So the real question is........

[jjohnson]

The md5sums came out correct for me, and gpg verifies that it has a good signature from "Fedora Project ".

CAREFUL IF YOU DUAL-BOOT FC2 and XP!

[cpu_fusion]

Some users of FC2-test3 discovered that, unlike FC1, it will render your coexisting Windows XP partitions unbootable. This may possibly be limited to certain hardware configurations, but it's hard to say with no official word from the Fedora team on a fix for this, despite it having been in bugzilla since at least the test 2 release.

In soviet russia, Linux disables your Windows installation.

Re:WARNING: This key is not certified with a trust

[Oloryn]

Just finished downloading the iso images from the bittorrent link. Public key verification doesn't look good.

gpg --verify ./MD5SUM
gpg: Signature made Thu 13 May 2004 01:25:04 PM MDT using DSA key ID 4F2A6FD2
gpg: Good signature from "Fedora Project "

This indicates that the MD5SUM has been verified correctly with the indicated key

gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg: There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.

This indicates that gpg can't find a chain of signatures from either your key or from a key marked as 'trusted' in the trust database to this particular key. If you've never signed anyone else's key, or you're never maintained the trust database in gpg, you can pretty well expect to get this message on any file you verify. It's pretty well meaningless unless you've taken steps to use the 'web of trust' features in pgp/gpg. Unless you're really paranoid, I wouldn't worry about the validity of the signature

SELinux

[daserver]

Can't wait to download and test SELinux, which should work out of the box. It's disabled by default, but you should be able to enable it by adding add "selinux" to the install line when installing. More information: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/selinux/

Apt sources

[SockMonster]

If anybody was looking for an update without downloading the entire isos to do it, if you have apt, add this to your sources.list: rpm http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/fedora.us/fedora fedora/2/i386 os updates rpm-src http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/fedora.us/fedora fedora/2/i386 os updates rpm http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/fedora/fedora/ fedora/2/i386 os updates rpm-src http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/fedora/fedora/ fedora/2/i386 os updates

Re:Bad MD5Sums here... (awe suck!)

[Oloryn]

My ISO files match the md5sum file included, but does that mean that they are really from fedora? Or does it just mean that the ISOs I have are the ones that were inteneded to be sent over the torrert...ie. no corrupted files?

The matching by itself only means the latter - that the files you received aren't corrupted.

What gives some confidence that the files are from Fedora is the fact that the MD5SUM file is digitally signed by Fedora's signing key. Once you've installed the Fedora Project's key into your gpg keyring (run

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 4F2A6FD2

), you can verify this by running

gpg --verify MD5SUM

Since the MD5 checksums are digitally signed by the Fedora Project, you can be pretty confident those checksums come from the Fedora Project, and since the torrent files match the checksums, you can be pretty confident that these files come from Fedora.

Re:Arg...no love.

[Anonymous Coward]

Grab the new torrent at http://kuix.de/fedora

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian supports more archs than any other linux distro, which also includes PPC.

Re:smack! -1 Flamebait

[johnnyb]

Actually, if you take a look at it:

* Windows - 1 CD
* MS Office - 2 CDs
* VS.net - 3 CDs if I remember (and you only get 1 interface and 3 languages!)
* Photoshop - 1 CD
* Quicken - 1 CD
* Exchange (? never used it)
* SQL Server 2 CDs (I think - it's been a while)
* WinZIpp - download only

And this is only a small subset of what's available on most Linux distributions.

It's not bloat because (a) you can not load it, (b) even if you load it, it doesn't slow you down unless you run it, and (c) you have the freedom to build your own distribution without it.

New, working torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, to correct some of the absurd rumor and inuendo running around, yes, these files are genuine and they match checksums signed by the [e-mail] GPG key. So if you can't trust that you can't trust the distributor in general....

Now, for all of the snotty people who were poo-pooing BitTorrent because their downloads weren't going a million megs a second, let me explain precisely why:

YOU WEREN'T INVITED

Y'see, the torrent that got posted to Slashdot was never intended for widespread consumption. The tracker was hosted on an individual's home DSL via a java client and simply wasn't expected to handle the load of widespread usage. Once the hordes of gimmie gimmie kiddies showed up it fell right over. Repeatedly. No wonder you couldn't get a decent transfer rate and your connections were timing out. Then, to make matters worse, half of the people who started connecting in the first big wave decided to disconnect and throw their downloads in the trash. Boy, that's going to help a torrent with one seed just a whole bunch. And again, let's remind ourselves: YOU WEREN'T INVITED.

So now there's a new tracker and faster seeds and things are moving along nicely. And now you're invited. I'm sure you won't disappoint us by disconnecting your client the instant your download is done.

http://kuix.de/fedora/

Thank you for your patience and cooperation.

Re:Why isn't this on fedora.redhat.com

[juhaz]

fedora.redhat.com is still showing test 3. That seems odd to me. Why would some other site have the release version before the project's site?

Well, the schedule states that:
14 May Release to mirrors (morning)
18 May Release open, announced

So it's been released to mirrors by now, but the official release is not until tomorrow.

The four days are to make sure that every mirror is synchronized so everyone opens up at the same time which will, hopefully, prevent 'em from getting swarmed. This is probably a leak from one of those mirrors.

Am I just being paranoid?

As for being paranoid, that's a healthy attitude to take with everything downloaded from an anonymous torrent. Heck, everything downloaded from the internet for that matter. Checking GPG signatures and MD5SUMS should show if it's a real deal or something else.

FAST MIRROR of bittorrent cd iso images

[Anonymous Coward]

ftp://ftp.gaminguk.net/Mirrors/fedora_FC2_bittorre nt_cd_iso/ [gaminguk.net]