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Yggdrasil ships Linux Open Source DVD
JWhitlock writes " ZDNet reports that Yggdrasil Computing has released a Linux DVD Archive. It's a DVD9-ROM with the FTP archives of Metalab.org and GNU.org. It's all freeware source, no binaries, 8.3GB compressed, over 23 GB uncompressed. It has no distributions on it, so you have to have Linux first. From the website:
"...you must be running Linux kernel 2.2.14, 2.3.28 or later in order to access files located more than four gigabytes into the DVD. Aside from that, your standard CD-ROM and iso9660 ("isofs") filesystem support that you use for accessing CD's will be sufficient to access this DVD. "
You can only get it direct from their website" Remember the old infomagic set? That thing blew me away thinking "A whole gig!", but thats nothing compared to this stuff.
Oh wait. Never mind.
What would that have been like 10 regular CD's ? Talk about a nice compact copy of a lot of code..
UPS Sucks
Now we can finally figure out how many dirty words are in the majority of Open Source software... I wonder how long it'll take to grep 23 gigs :)
Your standard CD-ROM? Wouldn't you need a DVD drive?
The really neat thing seems to be that Yggdrasil is also releasing the software they used to create the DVD to the community, according to the press release. They compare it to the past release of mkisofs and cdwrite that led to the move of Linux distros onto CDs; can anybody who remembers back that far comment? Was it really impossible to burn DVDs under Linux prior to this?
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Don't know, but I have an Infomagic collection from end 1996 that contains 6 CD's, or about 4 Gigabytes. And that's talking back in 1996! When kernel 2.0 was just out.
:)
Aah, back then it also ran with 4 MB RAM, which can't be said of most distro's nowadays (not that I blame them
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Yggdrasil Computing... holy crap. I thought those guys were out of buisness long ago. Their web pages hadn't been updated in what seemed like years. Anyone know what they've been doing (other than the DVD archive) since their last dist. release?
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
The blurb also says Yggdrasil is releasing the software they used to master the DVD.. How would such a beast differ from mkisofs+cdwrite/cdrecord?
.sig: Now legally binding!
Wow. I thought they had died off years ago. I see they are selling the few remaining copies of their 1995 Plug-and-play Linux. It looks like they have given up on the OS side of linux and are concentrating on the software and code side. It is cool that they are still hanging around and it will be interesting to see what they do from here.
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I have to keep them, because it's the only place left to find "Abuse" since crack.com went the way of the bit-bucket.
Best Linux Game EVER!! I wonder how useful this DVD could be! ;-)
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Is it just me, or is their site a candidate for entry to Ghost Sites? I mean, they have their 1995 distro on display, without a touch of irony. Maybe I am missing something...
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
From the CD contents:
2 GB of hello kitty trash can icons.
A 3.8 GB collection from the "best of swap space 1998" awards.
11 GB of lazer sounds.
1.2 GB of the most realistic surround sound fart ever recorded.
120k text file explaining why you should get a high speed internet connection so that this shit isn't out of date as soon as you put the disc in your drive.
Intergalactics - A pretty cool strategy game in a java applet
Now that's a blast from the past. They had one of the earliest, if not *the* earliest, commercial distributions of Linux.
Their claim to fame was their live filesystem. You could mount the CD as the basis for a full Linux system. Add a bit of actual disk space for tmp and home, and you were in business.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Well I am all for DVD but I have many machines that aren't equiped to deal with DVD do they have CDs for these?
Respond to s
Writable DVDs are single layer- meaning only 4 Gb.
Production DVDs are double layer and the pressing houses want the data fed to them in a just-so format on a DLT. What Yggdrasil has done is make a program to master that tape for you without needing a Windows box and expensive commercial software. For a DVD writer, I suspect that the traditional tools work just fine.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
WTF this is good for ?
I can leech any source I want from
metalab any time.
Why would I need 20 gigs of source most of
which I will never use.
( yes I didn't think too much before posting, but hey, this is slashdot, why would I )
This DVD better be a weekly subscription or i'm going to have a backup of ever out of date software.
Open Source moves faster then anything out there. Getting a copy of win98 might last you 4 years, a copy of Gnome is only good for about 4 weeks.
-Jon
this is my sig.
1)Maybe because many new computers come with DVD's 2)Many people still dual boot and use their DVD player 3)Many people buy DVD players in anticipation they can use them at some point and are cheap enough to justify this. 4)because they want to...... Anything else ?
...../......
You're talking about mastering and burning a DVD recordable disk. Those are single layer affairs and can only hold 4Gb- end of story. This is a production double layer disk produced by a pressing house. The pressing houses only accept DLTs with a special formatting of the data- previously, you needed expensive, proprietary applications (that ran on Windows, for the most part, from what I understand) to master the tape for pressing. The Yggdrasil app does the tape mastering for you.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Posted by polar_bear:
The first Linux book that I bought was Yggdrasil's Linux Bible - I'm glad to see Yggdrasil back on the map.
Yggdrasil is back again and fills the whole that SuSE opened by stopping to sell their Linux Snapshot CDs.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
By the way, if you look carefully at the DVD page, you'll see that there is actually a way to get the DVD "for free," assuming that either:
(Does anyone else remember the bad old days when, rather than the relatively modern thing of arguing about whether Slackware was about to set up horrendous and rapacious licensing, or the newbie thing of arguing over the same thing for Red Hat, that the flame wars were over the peculiar way Yggdrasil had created for pulling programs automagically off CD on demand so that you'd only have the stuff you actually used on your hard drive? Boy, there were flame wars back then...)
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Too bad it's not bootable, or this would be the ultimate rescue disk.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
I saw a stack of 10X DVD drives at CompUSA a few days ago for about that. It also works as some ridiculous multiplier CD drive, too. Heck, they might even be cheaper than that (I got one on sale for about $110 nearly a year ago.)
Go get one.
You don't have to run MPAA movie DVDs on the thing if you don't want to. (Er, actually you can't very easily, can you?) But you can then access all the stuff that's becoming availale on DVD-ROM, like this Yggdrasil basket of goodies, or SuSE's now-up-to-6-or-7-CDs-or-1-DVD distro. (And maybe even stuff like Brittanica's DVD encyclopedia if it doesn't require some wierd proprietary Windows-only reader software.)
(Now, if only the price of DVD writers (and blanks) would come down so that I can afford to back up all those gigabytes of cheap hard drive I have.)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
-- Alastair
I for one changed over from WinBlowze to Linux and happen to have a DVD player in my box. Also, many people do actually dual boot or have someone on their network that has a DVD player, so I for one am glad that SOMEONE is using this format in Linux. Not that I see a lot of Windows uses for DVD besides movies yet, but I think its great that we start using this tech.
I for one do not find this irrelevant and just because it contains certain keywords does not make it unworthy.
As for the comments about CmdrTaco..... you can keep him, I'm not a big fan either.
I read several places that you could either get suse as 6 cds or a dvd.
Does anyone know how they made it (pay a company or made it themselves?)
The MPAA gets $15 for every CSS enabled DVD drive sold, you are indirectly funding the MPAA's DVD lawsuits.
That would be much cheaper and better for many of my machines around here.
Respond to s
There is a reason why Yggdrasil's Linux distro has failed.
Anyone who tried to pronounce "Yggdrasil" chocked to death.
That name just rolls right off the tongue. Catchy and easy to remember - both very good for company names - and to think those bastards in California gave them a hard time about that. Good thing I'm part Norweigian to fully appriciate it - lord knows that you only want your name to make sense to about 4% of the people visiting you site... less is better, but not everyone is perfect.- ----------
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There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I was part-shopping for a new machine, and found a Creative Labs 6X on pricewatch for $67. Unfortunately, I think that DVD hardware makers are still required to pay the DVD-CCA. Which sucks. The best way to go (and the way I chose) was to hit ebay, and buy a used DVD drive that is old enough to not have the new RPC-2 region controls in it. (check out www.dvdutils.com for a list of which drive models are region free) With a used model, none of your money will go to support more lawsuits to kill your fair-use rights.
I spent less than $50, got a DVD-ROM, and didn't pay "the man" a cent. Sounds good to me!
wow...news from 1995. woohoo!!!. were these guys in frozen storage for a couple of years?
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
my opinion is the only one that matters i mean i dont care so why should anyone else i install everything by rpm and downloading patch and installing patches is for nerds and besides ive got adsl so who cares about the poor fuckers with the slow modem connections that might possibly want the source code all i know is that i dont want it so no one else could possibly want it either by the way im 13.
SuSE has their professional version (7.0), at newly updated RH like prices, available with 6 CDs & the contents of the CDs on one DVD.
They have personal edition available as well, for what used to be the pr ice as the whole thing.
Lastly they have an update version which will save you a couple bucks but you lose the manuals.
A comparison is here.
~~ What's stopping you?
It is becoming more and more transparent, your reasoning for putting such Linux related articles in the news section is no more than an agenda of making Linux look good and doing it as publicly as you can in your little space on the web. Slashdot gives users the CHOICE not to see Linux articles, you CmdrTaco, do not.
Slashdot, may have a bias, that is well known, but there is also a thing called ediquette. It dictates that Linux articles do NOT go in the news section, but in the Linux section. This is so those who for some reason on another, don't want to see every Linux related release can skip over it and read about thier favorite Corporate conspiracy theory, or whatever they are interested in. CmdrTaco, you should respect Slashdot's own posting sections, rather than push your personal agenda.
Oh yeah, I willing to bet some "moderator" will moderate this DOWN as a troll, just like they did with my last (albiet, not as coherent and well written) post.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Thus, it is the first book about UNIX with a picture of one on the cover.
Axel
Axel
mhm23x3, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose
For instance, a single DVD can be 2-sided and have 2 layers per side. CDROM's aren't made this way, and therefore can't read ANY DVD.
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
Problem with this is I am a Mac user whose LinuxBox is NOTHING more than a toy. I don't find Linux especially usefull, It's just a good way to learn how Unix is put togethor.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Because it's cool?
Redmond, 20 september 2000
Today Microsoft released Windows 2000 Third Millenium Edition (W2K3ME for short). It features all kinds of interesting software, and takes up only 23 Gigabytes of disk space. However, users have complained of suddenly getting filesystems unaccesible to others Micro$oft OSes, and are reporting strange phenomena, such as files called "vmlinuz" and the explorer renamed "Gnome". Microsoft has not yet responded.
Yggdrasil's DVD is the first dvd-9 (9 gigabyte double layer DVD) with this kind of content. There are some single layer (4.7 GB) DVD's around and SuSe's might be one of them. Those are easier to make.
Nobody has made a DVD-9 full of free software before. The mastering software didn't exist. But it does now, and it's free.
(Now, if only the price of DVD writers (and blanks) would come down so that I can afford to back up all those gigabytes of cheap hard drive I have.)
Speaking of backups, I found a great service the other day that's finally allowed me to back up lots of storage. Connected.com allows unlimited online storage ... for only $15/month. I think it's only Windows only, but I upload a tar/gz from my Linux box periodically. It does specifically say that it's not intended to be abused by huge amounts of multimedia content. :)
It also does a good job of comparing the contents of files, so if you have a database or a mail file, it will only upload the blocks of the file that actually change.
Highly recommended. My mother-in-law is even using it over a dial-up modem, and it works great.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
How do I set the SCSI ID on my $100 DVD drive? Oh wait, I can't, the $100 drives are IDE...
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Everyone has a memory of their first Linux distro, and its installation.
- --
Mine was the original Yggdrasil release (and how can you not like a company with a name straight out of the same mythos that spawned Thor, Odin, Asgard, Loki, etc?). It installed reasonably painlessly (had to rebuild the kernel to get the old sound blaster working right, but that was just one of those i/o address things IIRC). It worked *great* after that and the kernel rebuild was a neat experience. Gave me a bulletproof (mostly) multi-tasking OS with support for sound. I even got an earlier X version working on it, though at the time I was a command line maniac. It even read my FAT drives from DOS.
And the installation was quick and mostly painless, unlike OS/2 2.1, which never could install even with hours of help from IBM in Florida. Unlike Windoze 3.1 which installed but ran like a dead sloth and often blue screened.
The Yggdrasil distro was good for its time. And their was a gal at their tech support, handle of manx@yggdrasil.com IIRC, who was one of the friendliest, perkiest and most helpful tech support people I ever dealt with.
Only one time did that distro ever freak me out... when I saw (for the first time, never having heard of one before) the words "kernel panic" come across my screen late one a.m. after doing some rather obnoxious things with some registers I shouldn't have touched. Even this was a valuable learning experience that opened up new doors for me.
I'm glad to see they aren't dead. As somebody said, compared to these guys, the latecomers that dominate the market today are "newbies".
-----------------------------------------------
"VIsual editor? *THAT'S* what it stands for? Were they on drugs?"
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Aris
(See? I keep the subjects clean! :)
It's half-surprising it's taken this long for a Linux bundle on DVD..
Just remember them crazy Germans at SuSE did it first. (I can't wait to get the 7.0 upgrade; new kernel and more apps on the DVD than on the 6 CD's!)
(Guess I need an RPC-I DVD drive now... :)
ps: fyi: if you get a new dvd drive, make sure it's rpc-i. rpc-ii drives have the region coding firmwired into the drive itseld, and you can only change region 5 times. (maybe a new zealander can assist The Cause(tm)...)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Yggdrasil was my first Linux distro from about 4 (5?) years ago. It came with a VHS tape to show you how to get running....I still have it. Its a action packed tape ;-)
All in all, that was a pretty kickin distro for the time.
When this site became property of a company it no longer was his baby. If you think this is true, then you've never sold part of anything you worked on to anyone else.
F /...
The fact of the matter is, cmdrtaco, is prolly the worse of the editors next to Hemos. they both remind me of Bob Costas.
---
Solaris/FreeBSD/Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
I respect peoples right to make their own esicsions, but don't most of the newer Linux folk simply download packaged binaries [or packged source] thse days?
Personally, I do. I even keep a text file called `unclean' which lists things that aren't packaged. There's RPMs everywhere [and utils like RPMFind, Helix Update, and autoRPM to help you get them]. While DEBs are a little less popular, most Debian folk I know would prefer to apt-get software than compile it.
I generally use tarballs in an emergency, of when there's something [typically pre 1.0] I really want that nobodies packaged yet [which hasn't been for eight months].
Having a database of exactly what's installed on my system makes upgrades and finding packages off the net extremely handy. The pre and post install scripts of nearly all RPMS sort out libraries and other stuff. Security stuff is also much easier when you have a list of what's on your system, anhd can upgrade without breaking something else.
So why do other people prefer to use tarballed source? The vast majority of newer Linux users don't know C41, and why this isn't necessary to hack a makefile or type `./configure', tarballs are still very complicated. Especially when they don't compile.
This isn't a troll - its a query.
Yig-dra-sil. Not difficult at all.
They were my favourite distro until they stopped being a distro. Too bad, they always did neat stuff.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Pardon my spelling. But nobodies been `innovative' enough to correct dab typing yet.
I respect peoples right to make their own decisions, but don't most of the newer Linux folk simply download packaged binaries [or packaged
source] thse days?
Personally, I do. I even keep a text file called `unclean' which lists things that aren't packaged. There's RPMs everywhere [and utils like RPMFind, Helix Update, and autoRPM to help you get them]. While DEBs are a little less popular, most Debian folk I know would prefer to apt-get software than compile it.
I generally use tarballs in an emergency, of when there's something [typically pre 1.0] I really want that nobodies packaged yet [which hasn't
been for eight months].
Having a database of exactly what's installed on my system makes upgrades and finding packages off the net extremely handy. The pre and post install scripts of nearly all RPMS sort out libraries and other stuff. Security stuff is also much easier when you have a list of what's on your system, and can upgrade without breaking something else.
So why do other people prefer to use tarballed source? The vast majority of newer Linux users don't know a language, and while this isn't necessary to hack a makefile or type `./configure', tarballs are still very complicated. Especially when they don't compile correctly.
This isn't a troll - its a query.
* The disc isn't patches, its full source.
:)
* They're marketing this not at hackers / developers, but at Linux users per se. There's an interesting schism developing between those running the OS for quite some time who enjoy the hacking aspect opposed to more recent converts, who prefer `Software that Doesn't suck' and just want a stable, easy to use operating system for their workplace or home. Yes, both contribute - personally, I run and help out at installfests, give talks and be treasurer to my local LUG.
* The point this raises is that Yggdrasil are looking at Linux as it was in 1995, not now. The reason for the initial interest in Linux is its freeness, the long term rise in poularity comes from its stability, and the increased accessibility of more modern distributions. Red Hat's packaging system [which may not be superiour to debians, but was earlier] accounts for its now massive market share.
* By the way, kiss my ass
They've been quietly chugging away, working consulting gigs up until recently. I think they might have thought that their distribution was more work than it was making them money and discontinued the releases except for subscription users.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Yggdrasil is still alive and kicking in the old area they used to operate from. (Yeah, I know...)
Yggdrasil produced a DVD disk of everything on the Linux and GNU software repositories- while you can pull it off of the 'net, and with xDSL and Cable, it's easy to do so, it's nice to have a DVD or CD of a static image for when you've not got a networked situation.
Yggdrasil handed us an application that allows you to make that magic DLT formatting that a pressing house will only accept to make production DVDs.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Baldur's Gate! Also relevant for people who dual-boot for games. But yeah, there aren't too many.
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
So let me get this straight, everyone should stop producing DVDs of any sort until your demand for a DVD set of all the distributions is fulfilled? Not only that but you want only precompiled binaries? You sound like a windows man to me... don't waste everyones time pretending to dabble in linux.
- Toby
Odd, apache 1.1.1 is in there, but not 1.3.12? mysql-3.20.13-beta.tar.gz? It seems like alot of old stuff... is it just me? am I being blind tonight? I do that sometimes..
If you bother to scan the kernel archives, you'll see a lot of stuff from @yggdrasil.com.
So, no, they've not been completely in limbo.
--
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Someone from Suse told me they made it
on an Alpha Linux.
64 bit Linux did not have the 2GB limit.