ISO Image Web Site And CAD Program

It's often difficult to find ISO images of Linux distributions to download and burn onto a CD-ROM. LinuxISO.org is the solution: a Web site of ISO images of all major linuxes, FreeBSD and NetBSD. Another useful link is a Linux/BSD CAD program for architects: Cycas 2.0 which is zero-cost for personal use.

Comments

Oh man

[grappler]

I wish I had that CAD program last semester. I had to install windows just so I could put a CAD program on.

I realize that there ARE CAD programs for Linux, but I tried all the free ones I could find and they just weren't up to snuff.

Yeeeeeeeeehawwwwwwwwwwwww....

--
grappler

Cycas window manager?

[b_pretender]

Actually,
I'm more interested in knowing what window manager they are using in the screenshots for that Cycas 2.0 program. Those windows look really cool and I don't remember seeing that one at themes.org.

Can anyone tell me?

--

sounds kewl, but...

[Zen]

It's a really small site. 30 users max on their FTP, and it's full (duh :) You'd think if they really wanted to do something big like host ISO's, they would have at least one mirror server. It's probly gonna be days before their hits go down and the downloads speed up to make it worth it to download from them.

frozen potatos

[LocalYokel]

One thing about Debian is that you can't find an ISO or even a prepackaged set on CD of frozen/potato... This place is no exception.

Sure, I have the bandwidth and tools to download the trees and burn it myself, perhaps I am too lazy for not wanting to do both?

--

Re:frozen potatos

[jammer]

Actually, you can keep current images of Potato relatively easily. First you make a CD through the psuedo-image-kit, using the lists from one of the sites that has Potato reference images. After that, you have a nearly vurrent image: you can rsync it against a daily update image source on an rsync server, and (since you're using rsync, not downloading an entire new image) save mucho bandwidth. I did this for a while. It's fast and easy. Debian rocks. See http://cdimages.debian.org for details on this process.

good idea with a big but...

[cheezus]

It's often difficult to find ISO images of Linux distributions to download and burn onto a CD-ROM.

Actually, I've never had a problem finding the iso, at least of the distros i've used (mandrake, redhat, suse)... but the problem was finding a mirror that was fast enough, espeically when a new version is released (for example, when Mandrake 7.0 was released i never found a site that gave me a transfer rate higher than 14k/s untill about a week later). But given that this site was denying me my anonymous login, which i hope means that the ftp was full, and not that this is a subscription service, really, what good is it? I could see this as beeing a viable and perhaps even profitable (banner ads perhaps) idea, but if the bandwidth isn't there.

What I would suggest (and write the code for, if i weren't so lazy) is a site that keeps track of the mirrors for all the distros, and have a script that will direct a user to the closest/fastest mirror for them. That would be helpful, and I wouldn't even mind looking at banner ads for it.

---

Re:good idea with a big but...

[Syberghost]

I too have never had a problem finding ISOs for Linux distros, except for LinuxOne of course. :-)

What I'd like would be an ISO for OpenBSD, that's the hard one to find.

Also, there should be more PowerPC distros. That's a platform where we should be able to make some gains in the near future.

--

Re:good idea with a big but...

[drix]

My thoughts exactly. This has gotten quite a bit easier as of late though, because several huge mirrors have put up ISOs. In my case, acs-mirror.ucsd.edu (622mbps located about 100 miles away from me) now has full RedHat ISOs online. Anyone in California or the West Coast in general should get great throughput - I manage to pull about 200kbps steadily on @Home. I highly suggest them.

--

Re:good idea with a big but...

[LukeyBoy]

The file layout of the OpenBSD CD is copyrighted by Theo (the creator/packager of the OS) which makes copying, downloading and burning the CD illegal. This allows the group to support the project. If you really want it you gotta pay for it.

Re:good idea with a big but...

[Syberghost]

That's not very open, not to mention Open.

I think someone ought to put together a disk of their own and make the ISO image freely available. There's not a thing Theo could do to stop that.

There's already somebody else doing so cheaply, so free isn't much of a step beyond that.

As far as supporting the project; it's supposed to be open source. Linux and FreeBSD manage to exist without doing anything that asinine; is OpenBSD so unwanted that it can't work the same way?

Perhaps BSDi will bankroll a more complete security audit for FreeBSD, and make the whole question moot.
--

Re:good idea with a big but...

[Syberghost]

The file layout of the OpenBSD CD is copyrighted by Theo (the creator/packager of the OS) which makes copying, downloading and burning the CD illegal. This allows the group to support the project. If you really want it you gotta pay for it.

Actually, this isn't entirely correct.

The layout of their official CD is indeed copyright, and indeed proprietary and closed and just generally anti-open.

However, there is nothing stopping you from downloading the files, making your own ISO, and doing anything at all that you please with it.

They just don't make that very clear in their FAQ.

It's no wonder it's confusing. I'm trying to convince one of them (privately, I will not name names, except to say it's not Theo) to either change the FAQ, or let me change it. We'll see what happens.

I'm not confused, but lots of folks are. See the FAQ at LinuxISO.org for a perfect example; billy thinks it's the OpenBSD team's wishes that you don't create ISOs and distribute them, but that's neither my understanding from a careful reading of the OpenBSD FAQ, nor is it the view of the person with whom I'm corresponding.

It's just an unfortunate side effect of an elitist attitude that isn't at all uncommon in this segment of our industry.

It's the same attitude you see in the various arguments against improved Linux GUIs, user-friendly distributions, etc.

--

Re:good idea with a big but...

[Syberghost]

I was one of those someones, but I didn't think to post my reply here. You addressed pretty much the same points I did, except this one:

All the tools you need to build your own ISO is included in OpenBSD, anybody can make them. Yet nobody does. Think about that.

Actually, one company has, and charges $4.99 for it.

They instituted it due to popular demand.

If enough people wanted a cheap version on CD that they were willing to pay for it in sufficient quantities to make it economical for CheapBytes to pay to burn thousands of copies, how can anyone say there's no demand for the ISO image?

I guarantee you, if they provided an official free ISO, it'd be a major download on LinuxISO.org the day it made it to their site.

The other thing I addressed is *WHY* people want this thing in the first place.

One, as you said, is the download factor; you know you've got the whole thing if the ISO you downloaded is the same size on your HD as it is on the FTP site.

Another is, installing for somebody else, such as at an installfest at your local LUG. Whether you install it from floppies, from an FTP or NFS server, or even just by copying hard drives with Ghost or dd, it's still good to be able to hand the person a CD he can use to reinstall or fix or update or etc. later, when he doesn't have that high-speed connection available.

Another is, snaring people at events. If you can slap a disk in their hand, that's pretty cool. They're more likely to try it than if you just give them a card with http://www.openbsd.org on it.

Another is, businesses. I don't want to have to rely on the availability of another system for my install in some circumstances. In others, when I do use another system to power my install, I still don't want to be stuck *HAVING* to rely on it.

Another is, books and magazines. It's a lot easier for SysAdmin, or even Linux Journal, to justify including a CD if they don't have to burn the damn thing themselves.

McGraw Hill is publishing a series of Unix books right now that include CDs related to the various topics, such as Steve Maxwell's Unix Network Management Tools and the twice-as-long Red Hat Linux Network Managment Tools. Wouldn't you like to see something like "OpenBSD Network Management Tools"?

Or the inclusion of a CD with Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls?

Or the inclusion of OpenBSD instead of FreeBSD in some other book?

I would. Anybody who wants to see OpenBSD get used by more people should, too.

But leaving aside completely the question of an official ISO, they're accidentally (it appears) giving the impression that they're against that, when they claim to not be against it at all.

Look at this quote from the FAQ at LinuxISO.org's site:

4/26/00 - Lots of questions again about OpenBSD. Here is a link to OpenBSD's FAQ talking about ISO images. I feel it is a good idea to respect their wishes as the good folks there have given us a great OS. - billy

See, he interprets this (link to OpenBSD FAQ entry) to mean that they are opposed to people doing this.

They could fix this as simply as adding the following: "If you do create one, feel free to distribute it."

Or better, follow the above with: "If you do, and you're on a stable site that will be there for the long haul such as http://www.linuxiso.org or http://www.sourceforge.net, let us know and we'll link you in this FAQ."

That is, if those are their true intentions. But I see a lot the same old elitist attitude here. Their attitude seems to be: (this is not a quote, this is the impression I get)

"If people choose to misunderstand our FAQ, then that's their problem, not ours."

In reality, anyone who does computer support of any kind (which is what a FAQ is) can tell you:

If it isn't obvious to the reader/user, it isn't obvious.

Just change the FAQ, dudes. If that's too much work, let me know and I'll provide you with the new wording, guaranteed to make it clear that:

1) You encourage people to make ISOs available.
2) You don't do so yourself merely because you don't see the need.
3) You encourage people to buy from you if possible in order to support the project.

--

ISO's of something OTHER than distros?

[GoRK]

Has anybody collected links or is there even available any sort of collection of ISO's of anything OTHER than the OS distro's themselves?

E.G. StarOffice (cd for all sorts of platforms)

RedHat contribs?

Games, graphics, X, compos?

It would be really sweet to see some ISO's for apps. For some reason, I always find myself burning a bunch of tarballs onto a stack of CD's and I end up losing everything.

~GoRK

OOG LIKE LINUXISO!!!

[OOG_THE_CAVEMAN]

OOG JUST COME BACK FROM WILD CAVE PARTY!!! OOG DRINK LOTS OF CAVE BEER AND EAT FUNNY MUSHROOM, BUT WANT POST ON SLASHDOT BEFORE PASSING OUT!!! AAAAGGGHHH!!! OOG HEAD... START... FEEL... FUNNY...

When I first heard of Linux long ago,
I scoured yon net for an ISO...
But alas, after hours of vanished time
Not one archive could thy find.
Thy CD-R's wouldst be left blank,
Yon Lucifer's curse did thy thank.
How oh how dost thy change distros
When thy soul can't find an ISO?
BSD, Red Hat, and yon Debian...
Trekking through their large sites then,
Was the only way to acquire thy files.
And dear earth be damned, it tooketh a while.
But, lo! One glourious fortnight ago,
My ears didst hear of LinuxISO!
By the cooling warmth of Zepyhr's breeze,
Thine ISO's thy found with ease.
Thy CD-R's were filled and burned,
And never again shall thee be spurned!
And through yon net journeys to and fro,
Thy never enough can praise LinuxISO!

...

UUGGGHHH... OOG FEEL STRANGE...

Re:OOG LIKE LINUXISO!!!

[Hard_Code]

heh, classic

Funny, last time I saw an OOG post it was moderated down to 0 or something. I'm telling you, OOG is a Hank-the-Angry-Drunken-Dwarf protege.

This is nice, But...

[db_cooper]

This is nice, but the real beauty will be if they disable anonymous access and use this for mirror sites. With 650MB files, 30 users is ideal, except it wont help that many people. Now, if you use this as a central server, you can have mirror sites, all with the same version. Hopefully, some of the less competitive distros out there can take advantage of this, and standardize their distro versions across the web.

BTW - If you decide that you really like a distro, please buy a version of it (especially some of the BSD's), it will help the coders fund their efforts, and help insure a continuous forward progress.

powerful CAD programs for Linux?

[dotslasher2]

Does anyone know if/when major CAD software like SDRC IDEAS, Microstation, AutoCAD, or ProE will be ported to Linux? I know that AutoCAD was available for Unix why back when, but now they seem to be in bed with M$.

Re:Has Slashdot become a warez site??

[Another MacHack]

If Red Hat, etc., didn't want people to be able to download the ISO they might have started by not providing one to begin with. Granted, they wouldn't be able to stop people from making their own out of the Free software making up the distribution, but they didn't have to actively distribute one either.

solution?

[DestinyBWL]

30 users max on their FTP. tough. Have you seen http://www.burnomatic.com ? Good stuff. Not only does it rock if you have a slow conn, but it has most of the major linux distributions :)
Bradford L.

Re:Sengan lives!

[legoboy]

Nah.. The last story he posted (going from memory) was "Last All Odd Digit Day For Over 1,000 Years"

Problem was, there was another all odd day only 2 days later. Oops. Plus the fact that the 2 in both 27 and 29 is in fact an even number. Oops again. Never mind that the two ones in November's month number are every bit as odd as the 9 for September. That was a pretty funny article, in retrospect.

The search function says he posted something in January too, but let's ignore that.

------

As for other distros.

[Inoshiro]

Slackware's ISO, on ftp.freesoftware.com (try /pub/linux/slackware/slackware-7.0/iso/) is easy to grab, has fast transfer rates, and is in an obviously named directory..

I think the site is trying to target newer Linux adoptees with burners and an itch to try out a few different distros. Nothing else makes sense :-)
---

Distributed Archives

[Crutcher]

Something I have spent a good deal of time (but not much code 'cause, well, um, I'm Lazy?) thinking about is the idea of a distributed archive transfer protocol.

The way I see it, you would have some program, say 'datp', which would connect to a datp server, and make a file request. the server would return a list of secondary servers which contained the file requested, and the datp client would poll some of these servers, initializing a conection to the fastest of them, and concurently downloading digests of the file (the first X megs from server A, the second X megs from server B, etc.) and reasembling them localy. Add some check suming or hashing, and you could just let anyone that wanted to hook into the archive and provide you with mirrors, all nice and secure.

The concurent aproach sounds weird, but it is really the Right Thing in terms of arbitrary network topography.

Anyway, maybee some day I'll write something like this, or maybee I won't. Why Don't you, and make me happy?

---
"Elegant, Commented, On Time; Pick any Two"

Why bother with an ISO anyway?

[Lion-O]

I really don't see the need for ISO images for distibutions anymore. Its 650Mb of downloading software which, in most cases, is outtdated anyway. Nowadays every major distibution has options to do a download directly of the Internet so you are sure to install the latest versions of the software.

IMHO there are 3 majorly different Internet users. The homeuser, which we can divide into people who have a cheap connection (they can have a connection open 24/7 without the telephone charge (mainly US & Europeans who have Internet using the cable) and people who are on a dial-up. Then finally you have the corperate users.

The first category doesn't really have to worry about download times so why download 650Mb while you could settle for way less and have the latest version as well. Some friends say that its easier for them so they can quickly do re-installs when they have to but when you're on the net anyway I don't see the difference.

Then the dial-up users face the same problems and they also can benefit from downloading just a small portion instead of the whole ISO. IMHO it would be wiser to focus on making network installations even more easy then they are now.

Re:Why bother with an ISO anyway?

[PigleT]

Excuse me making a massive plug here ;)

I think it's all to do with the package management side of things. Your average (modal) distro is RPM-based and comes in box-sets for some strange reason (t-shirts, I gather, feature in it) and appeals to.. er.. the sort of person who buys box-sets; you've rightly spotted there's a 'hole' in who this kind of person actually is.

I'm in Europe and have an unmetered connection at 56k at home, and multi-T1 at work. I use CDs at work to get things like Stormix down because it represents a good block of useful stuff to kick-off a machine; however the box at home has long-since been dist-upgraded to run Debian 'unstable' via another initial CD and thereafter, it runs its own local mirror - because it can.
With Debian I can maintain mirrors with standard apps for the purpose (apt-move) on the machines both at work and home, and use them to save the massive download times at home.

There's another use for an ISO image - if the distribution doesn't mirror easily, you can grab the whole ISO at a stroke and mount it (-o loop) and use it for a network install in your own LAN if you want. But I think a more flexible package system (with operations like "get things from here, here and there" and "update what's available where" and "install this and all dependencies from the nearest source") is the answer. And that's why I like Debian.
~Tim
--
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,

Re:Why bother with an ISO anyway?

[PigleT]

"But is this initial CD one you bought or an ISO?"

Actually, I used ISOs for stormix so I had a nice consistent lump with everything-stormix I could ever want on it, to take home at the end of the day.

Similarly I had a local mirror of 'unstable' ("woody" as is the new name) on the machine at work, which also became a CD...

When I got home, install stormix: no problem. Insert 'unstable' CD, tell apt (one of the package-management toys in debian) that the local CD is a source, as is somewhere on mirror.ac.uk, and then update "what's available where", do an apt-get dist-upgrade and hey presto, one very uptodate installation, which I've kept uptodate daily (except when on holiday) since.

This answers the problem of "I only want 300M of the CD" - and if you have more than 1 machine on the LAN to install/upgrade, you sure don't want to be getting "that 300M" over and over again over the 56k link, like the 'install over 'net' options will; that's why I go for the local mirrors :)
~Tim
--
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,

CAD for schematic capture and pcb layout

[geirt]

For those of us working with electronics, eagle has existed for linux for some time now.

They even have a freeware version which is ok for weekend projects.

http://www.cadsoftusa.com/ or http://www.cadsoft.de/

This software is not a toy, it is one of the best pcb design packages available on any platform, and it is reasonably priced. Life is good to us electronics engineers !

Mirror tracking and redirection

[Cato]

There's a huge need for this sort of software, and I'd be happy to talk through design and requirements issues - I'm a bit short of time but could probably do some Perl prototyping.

I think there are a few requirements/design issues to be thought about:

- how to encode which mirror sites are available - XML encoding within a normal web page seems to be an obvious way to go, so that the same page can be human readable as well as making sense to the software.

- how automatic should this be? Sometimes highly automated systems are a pain (e.g. Perl's CPAN always used to redirect me to demon.co.uk, which was hugely overloaded - fortunately they provided a manual override).

- how can different types of client software or proxy software make use of this sort of 'mirror list' information? XML is probably the best common approach since modern browsers support this, making it possible perhaps to do it all in JavaScript, and there are many XML development tools available.

It would be great as a first step if the user could be shown a 'choose a mirror' page when going to a popular website such as samba.org, freebsd.org.

Then, the next step is to estimate closeness in some way (either statically, e.g. country TLD, or dynamically through measurements, e.g. ping times). The closer this is done to the client, the better, but moving this closer to the core of the network will avoid redundant measurement traffic.

Finally, the client (whether a browser, FTP client, or proxy cache) needs to use the closeness metric to automatically (or with confirmation if it's an interactive client) to choose a site and attempt to download the file.

Unfortunately the download will often fail (e.g. ftp site won't accept new logins, or the download takes too long). It's important that the system can notice this fact and switch to another mirror.

One interesting issue is working out which are the closest sites - should you use geography (same top-level country domain), topology (number of router hops or equivalent), latency (ping times), path bandwidth (using pchar/pathchar to work out slowest link), server load, or some combination?

There is some prior art in this area - distributed load balancing devices (e.g. Cisco's Distributed Director, and I think also RADware) do something quite similar. These types of tool use routing protocols and/or ping measurements to the local host (or whatever DNS server serves the client hostname) in order to work out the closest client to each server (using BGP in the Cisco product, which may not be very useful), or dynamic measurements in RADware (controversial because the client-local DNS server may view this as an intrusion attempt!).

There are also many client-side software tools that attempt to do this - e.g. GetRight for Windows, which pings a list of hosts and downloads from one of them.

Some proxy networks, e.g. Akamai, probably do something similar, though they are much more tightly integrated than this could be.

I think the best place to start would be defining a mirror-description language in XML, including optional 'closeness metric' attributes for future use; then develop a simple client in your tool of choice, maybe Perl or Python, for use in manually finding the best mirror to use (e.g. using country codes or similar); then try to integrate this into browsers and/or proxy caches.

I thought about this stuff a while back and sent an Ask Slashdot submission but it didn't get posted. Back then I was thinking in terms of using web proxy software plus some addon modules (maybe Apache + mod_rewrite + custom module, with web caching as an option for even faster downloads).

Cheap OpenBSD on German Magazine

[Cato]

I bought a German free-Unix mag the other day (I think it's called Free-X) because it had a cover CD with OpenBSD 2.6, costing only a few dollars/Euros. I don't have a URL, maybe someone else can supply one?

A lot cheaper than shelling out for the full OpenBSD CD and a lot easier than finding a spare 650 MB on my laptop so I can download it at work. Unfortunately the CheapBytes OpenBSD CD can't be exported for some reason - probably not necessary, now that the US has relaxed its crypto export laws.

It's a shame that OpenBSD relies so much on CD sales to fund the project - I bought a 2.5 CD a while back but buying a new CD every few months seems a bit excessive considering I'm only using it at home.