Fedora Core 2 released to Mirrors, Bittorrent 429
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."
Is this the final release or test3? (Score:0, Interesting)
I never understood the Bittorrent thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not put it on a P2P network like eDonkey? People will probably have other downloads moving at the same time, so the particular file will have much more sources for a much longer period of time than with Bittorrent.
Really, Bittorrent seems like a poor solution to a problem better solved by real P2P software.
Re:DVD Version? (Score:2, Interesting)
Even with all the different languages, three CDs should be fine.
Yum (Score:5, Interesting)
What about PPC? (Score:3, Interesting)
smack! -1 Flamebait (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... (Score:2, Interesting)
Because of the decentralised way that torrents work, it would be useless to attempt the same with them. A torrent is available for the duration that one person holds a tracker file open. I love the totrent concept because it means that as well as "flash mod" assistance in getting a file quickly, you are only ever sharing 1 file at a time, and the worst the *AA could do is get you for that one file.
Treat a torrent like a freshly baked cake - get it while its hot.
If you miss it, then go looking at the other p2p programs.
I don't... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got my bittorrent client (Azureus) running 24x7 but only sharing torrents that need seeders. I stop seeding when there is a seed for every 4 peers (as long as I've upped 50%). When the seed/peer ratio goes down I have Azureus auto start the torrent and continue uploading. This way I give my bandwidth to those torrents that need it most.
I also leave my computer on at night and since I'm on broadband with no cap I keep it uploading stuff. Hey, I'm paying for always on so I may as well use it, plus I'm not saturating the local loop during the day and pissing off other people.
Here's a way to save time and disks (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Great (Score:5, Interesting)
Estimates go as low as 977 million [esu.org] people have notions of English. Or up to 1.5 billion [englishclub.com].
The average googling for "how many people speak English" gets to One in Five [englishenglish.com] in the world. So only 80% of the world has no notion of English at all...
By the way, Google Zeitgeist shows that about half of their visitors use Googles English interface. So i estimate that about half of the FC2 users will need the 4th CD.
Re:DVD Version? (Score:2, Interesting)
The same applies to Fedora.
Triple wammy out to the masses (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Fedora No Worky! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the whole point! After a few days, when everyone already has it, getting the ISO's the conventional way from the mirrors is no problems, but when the ISO's are first out, BT works great.
And a lot of people (like me) do leave their Torrents run for a while. I throttle the upload (--max_upload_rate) so it doesn't hurt my interactivity much at all and let is run as long as possible, usually several days. I get a good feeling from being altruistic, and I bet I'm not that rare.
Have you actually tried BT, or just read about it and decided it's not worthwhile? I'm amazed each time I use it. It often starts slow (right now it says it will take 1426 hours to download!) but then it really picks up (I'll be surprised if it takes more than 3 hours, probably less). It's always seemed faster than a straight download, and I'm giving back while getting my "fix". It's a win all around, IMO.
Thanks, Fedora developers! (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks again!
Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Bittorrent seems like an odd way to distribute files for any extended length of time. It wholly depends on how many people are downloading it at any specific moment, so when you come back maybe 3 days later, the download speeds drop to a trickle because you're the only one downloading the file now.
Your observations fly in the face of empirical evidence, which has clearly shown that BitTorrent is in fact the best way to distribute FC2.
Just because you can't understand it doesn't mean it won't work.
ATI? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:DVD Version? (Score:2, Interesting)
I downloaded the text version off Project Gutenberg (3.12MB) and RAR'd it. Manually tweaking the compression settings I managed to get it down to 720KB. Throwing in a DOS self-extractor brings that up to 815KB.
I'm sure the remaining 625KB on a standard diskette would be enough for a barebones DOS, RAM disk executable (for extracting War and Peace to memory for viewing), text viewer, and file system overhead.
And there you have it. A portable diskette that turns any PC into a lean, mean, war-and-peace-presenting machine!
Fedora: By Adults, For Adults? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're after a noisy, flashy Linux with umpteen ways to play music and videos, Fedora is not for you.
I you're after a professional piece of work that seems to have been built by adults for adults, look at Fedora.
Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted, I have more bandwidth available to me than you do (work doesn't do much on the weekend, so I've got the full big pipe to myself) but it seems to be doing awfully well.
You may want to cap BitTorrent's upstream bandwidth to 75% of your upstream bandwidth. For example, if your upstream bandwidth is 128 kilobits/s, cap BT's uploads at 96 Kb/s. The caps put on cable modems are very unfriendly when you actually hit them -- by hitting your upstream bandwidth, you'll typically slow down your downloads to a similar rate. So rather than uploading 128 Kb/s and downloading 768 Kb/s, you'll get 128 Kb/s in both directions. But if you slow your uploads to 96 Kb/s, your downloads can get the full speed of 768 Kb/s. It's kind of wierd, but it's the way the caps work.
I don't have any experience with DSL -- but it wouldn't surprise me if it works the same way.
Re:oh don't be silly (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I helped a blind woman get set up with Linux last year, and she uses ed exclusively -- her braille terminal is only one line, so something like vi is pointless overhead.
(PS: busybox, not blackbox, of course. My earlier post was clearly before I had coffee.)
Re:This is a hoax (Score:4, Interesting)
You can't check the md5sums of the ISOs until the entire bittorrent download is complete. Bittorrent makes no guarantee that all of ISO 1 is finished downloading before you start getting ISO 2. It's common for bittorrent to go back and patch "holes" in files near the end of the download - and any gap in the file will mess up your md5sum check.
Re:Great (Score:3, Interesting)
So I still think the original estimate was pretty good.
Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... (Score:3, Interesting)
And yet... it works anyway.
View it another way: I want to release my new Linux distribution (ChaosDiscordLinux 12.0). I've got my own site to distribute it from, and two guys who are willing to run mirrors.
Option 1: The old school way. I put the files on each site and serve them over HTTP and FTP. The maximum speed I can serve my files at is limited by the bandwidth to those three sites. If I get surprisingly popular, my bandwidth will peg out and things will generally suck.
Option 2: Bittorrent. I run seed the torrent, as do the other two sites. Now, as a worst possible case people who want to download the file are still limited to the bandwidth of those three sites. However, if there are any surges in demand during those surges everyone downloading starts helping each other. End result: at the worst case it's about the same as the old way, but can potentially be good.
Is it perfect? No. But it works damn well. One of the benefits is that it looks and behaves like a simple download manager. Not everyone is interested in the details of being on a file sharing network. I don't want an IRC client, to help distribute searches, to potentially share other files. Bittorrent just makes it work. As an added bonus, Bittorrent requires a certain level of accountability; there is a centralized location to send a DMCA takedown request. This makes it much more palatable for various people squeemish with the generally shady looking P2P services.
I downloaded Red Hat 9.0 months after its release and still found a number of seeds available. It was the fastest ISO download I've ever had. The World of Warcraft beta test is being distributed over Bittorrent and works great. I'm into video games and really appreciate File Rush [filerush.com], which gets me game demos and video footage at lightning speeds. Bittorrent is the only download path I have that regularlly saturates my cable modem.