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."

DVD Version?

[TheLoneCabbage]

You know in my day DOS3.3 still fit on one 1.44 floppy!

I know it's a test platform but do they need to include a test copy of war and peace with EVERY release? Does anyone have a particulary clever reason (besides source disks) why it needs to be this frigging big?

This is one of the big reasons I switched to Debian, I didn't want to get sadled with a multigig *BASIC* install. No flame wars, please, but for my personal taste I can't fathom RH any more.

Mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

Please mod down as "Stupid"

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[chaffed]

Right, bittorrent is not a good persistent conduit. However that is midigated by the mirrors that pop up on standard HTTP and FTP servers. Bittorrent is just a great way to get a lot of large files out to a lot of people at the same time while using a little bandwidth as possible.

Re:Does anyone ever stick with their current insta

[dleifelohcs]

newer things. better versions. faster. bugfixes. security fixes.

I can keep going if you like.

there are plenty of reasons to upgrade your operating system and/or kernel.

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[Junta]

But it scales at worst case no worse than http/ftp so long as the hosting providers normally providing http/ftp allocate equal resources to serving bittorrents. When you are the only user of an http/ftp site, you get satisfactory speeds, so bittorrent would do fine for that scenario. Times like this where http/ftp services would crumble under the load, bittorrent offloads the work effectively and yields better download speeds than http/ftp do when there is only one client.

The thing with bittorrent is that you can get a small seed from an official source and be more assured that the content you are downloading is, in fact, what you want and not a trojan with the same name that turned up on some P2P network search. MD5 sums can help this, but it means in the event of an incorrect download, you've wasted your time and bandwidth. BitTorrent provides a distribution method with more verifiable authenticity before downloading than most P2P networks, and that is very valuable for this application.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

the 4th CD consists of lots of languages (and nothing else) so most people can skip it

really, do most people speak english ?
me thinks 90 percent of the world [infoplease.com] cannot speak one word in English.

Troll, but I'll take the bait...

[Moth7]

As a user who migrated my box from FC1 to Gentoo 2004.1, emerge world is all well and good - once you have the thing installed. After the luxuries of anaconda, untarring and compiling the whole system yourself is somewhat tiresome and you are bound to get most of it wrong the first time.
Don't get me wrong, I am a devout Gentoo convert and wouldn't use anything else now, but for someone coming from the graphical handholding of Fedora, the Gentoo install is like walking blind. And heaven help you if you didn't print off the install manual - better hope those Fedora disks are still lying around for you to get your internet connection back after attempt #1.

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[RickHunter]

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

Yup, that's right folks. The 400+ seeds you often see for hours on newly-released anime digisubs are ALL people recruited by the fansubbing groups. NONE are just regular downloaders who leave their clients open. Not one. Yes, this means that fansubbing groups must be in excess of a couple thousand people each.

Get a clue. Its regular behavior to leave a BT client open for at least an hour afterwards. Not only that, but you don't have to have a complete copy of the file to upload. BT clients exchange bits of the file, so you're uploading while you're downloading, which saves on the bandwidth provided by the clients used to "officially" seed a file. Despite what you say, in practice, BT works quite well - people are willing to be altruistic because the protocol rewards them for it.

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[dougmc]

Bittorrent seems like an odd way to distribute files for any extended length of time.

Perhaps, but it's an awesome way to distribute them when six gazillion people want something large the moment it comes out. FC2 definately falls into this category right now.

And even once the initial flood of demand has been satisfied, it scales at least as well as downloading via a web or ftp site -- and much better if two or more people are downloading. FC is popular enough that it will probably have at least two people downloading (probably many more) it at any given time until FC3 comes out.

And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file - I'm sorry, but relying on people's altruistic behavior is plain stupid.

You're wrong. People DO leave their BT clients open longer than needed to download the file. Some people do have extra bandwidth to spare, and some will leave it open just because they saw it was going to take 4 hours to download, so they went to bed and didn't come back for 10 hours.

And even if they don't, it still works, because they were uploading while they were downloading.

Re:Great

[maxume]

This comment is in no way insightful. Come on. Sure, major chunks of India/China/Europe don't speak English as thier primary language, but they are more than likely to known at least a word or two. Throw in the fact that many of the people who don't have computers are probably the same ones who don't speak any english, and the situation just continues to deteriorate.

Re:Great

[JanneM]

"knowing a word or two" != "wanting to run the destop in English". I speak, read and write English fluently, and I prefer to have my desktop in Swedish anyway - together with support for Japanese, as I am studying the language.

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[justins]

And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file - I'm sorry, but relying on people's altruistic behavior is plain stupid.

Well, you're also relying on the fact that a lot people aren't going to be sitting at their computer waiting to turn off bittorrent the instant the download is complete.

Unofficial torrent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that this is a unofficial torrent, Core 2 will not be released to the public before tuesday.

Read this about unofficial torrents:
http://livna.org/~anvil/fc2-torrents.tx t

So the real question is........

[rsax]

Has anyone actually verified that these ISOs are legit by using the Fedora GPG key [redhat.com]?

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[Eric Smith]

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

Maybe you don't, but that doesn't mean that nobody does.

When I downloaded fc2test3, I got it in just over an hour, but I left the BT client running for another 12 hours, and the stats show that it uploaded almost 10x as much as it downloaded.

Why not put it on a P2P network like eDonkey?

Nothing is stopping you, or anyone else, from putting it on any P2P network you like.

Really, Bittorrent seems like a poor solution to a problem better solved by real P2P software.

Bittorrent was designed to solve the problem of distributing files that are in high demand. It does this better than most other P2P software, so I'd conclude that Bittorrent is an excellent solution.

Re:DVD Version?

[maxbang]

Perhaps that extra 625KB could be used to store a sense of humor :)

Re:smack! -1 Flamebait

[dcstimm]

Yeah If windows came with every application under the sun it would be 4 cds too, Remember linux can fit on a 16kb flash card, but since fedora wants to package every known linux application with their release, they have huge install cds..

Re:Great

[Pharmboy]

No PPC version. Fedora only supports the various i386 flavours. Redhat used to support Alpha and Sparc, but I think they dropped everything but i386/i64/amd64 a few versions back.

Try yellowdoglinux.com for a PPC version of Linux. Or OS-X ;)

Re:Great

[DJStealth]

Since Slashdot, to my knowledge, is completely in English. I would guess that 99% of people reading these comments will NOT NEED the 4th CD. (However, some may want it if they speak other languages as well)

Re:Are you a corporate shill?

[reallocate]

Of course not, silly boy.

>> ...users who value ease of use over and in place of technical merit, and users who themselves lack the technical prowess to develop more effectivve and efficient computing practices but still wish to identify themselves with an elitist technical community.

First of all, no conflict exists between ease of use and technical merit. Deleting a file using "rm" or with a mouse get you to the same place and do the same thing.

Second, the technical community, if there is one, is no more elite than the marketing community, or the realtor community, or the barber community. The elitism in the tech community is bogus, and primarily finds expression in the arrogance many of its members express toward anyone else. It's rather like someone prancing around arguing that people who drive cars with autotmatic transmissions are trying to "leverage" a little glory from the "elite auto mechanic community".

>>...they are rightly the target of ridicule in the legitimate FOSS technocrat community

For using the same damn software that's in every other bleeding Linux distribution? Fedora drops a couple mp3 players, uses a Gnome theme that doesn't glow in the dark, and gets beat up for it. By some nonexistent "legitimate FOSS technocrat community".

>> The Redhat: Fedora Core product is for users who:
# Would prefer to use the tools prescribed for them by others or by default in their corporate environment.

Well, like I said, it's the same damn software. And, if your boss owns the hardware, your boss gets to "prescribe" the software that's on it.

# Value a shiny, flashy system initialization screen where essential details are hidden by a pretty picture.

It's not shiny or flashy. It's rather dark and blue and it just sits there and does nothing. ANd those intitialization details are not essential to a user, who won't understand them anyway. They get paid to work, not understand Linux messages.

Re:BitTorrent's weakness

[A Commentor]

Yep, same message here... What is so strange is during the entire time I've had BT up, my upload speeds have stayed between 8-9 KB/s (I told the client to limit it to 8 KB/s - half my upload pipe), yet my downloads have been 0 KB/s for the majority of the time. I was able to get a few fast bursts upto about 70 and staying around 30 KB/s, but this is so much slooower that FTP where I see 150-180 KB/s from a good server. I've had this going for the last 10 hours and am still only at 20%... On a good FTP server I would have been done in about 6 hrs for 3 CDs.

All I see from the "Pro"-BT people is how great BitTorrent is, and how much better it is than FTP or other options, but I've been disappointed every time I've used it, and performance this time seems even worse than normal (Tracker time-out problems for the last 40 mins... and still No connection).

BitTorrent needs to fix this tracker bottle-neck problem!