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.

Comments

I can't wait to rip this with DeCSS..

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wait. Never mind.

Dirty words

[SClitheroe]

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 :)

Re:Dirty words

[Precision]

Accually part of sourceforge is a huge archive of everything that's ever been released on sourceforge, we also mirror about every major open source repository also. You can check it out at download.sourceforge.net

It also includes DVD-mastering software

[ethereal]

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?

Re:It also includes DVD-mastering software

[mvw]

Was it really impossible to burn DVDs under Linux prior to this?

It might depend on the access method. What we have here is a giant ISO 9660 file system (the format common CD-ROMs use) to access the DVD. This seems indeed not to have been possible due to a kernel limitation in Linux.

They describe the making of the DVD here, the really interesting link BTW.

The natural format for such a large optical disc would be UDF of course. I am not sure if this is also on that DVD (or if dual ISO 9660 / UDF discs are possible at all).

ghost site

[banky]

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...

Included items.

[len(*jameson);]

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.

There's a little misunderstanding...

[Svartalf]

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.

Now, for my next trick, a new release of Arena!

[Christopher B. Brown]

Wow. Yggdrasil is back, after a long hiatus of apparent inactivity.

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:

• You are a longsuffering Plug'n'Pray subscriber who has been waiting for five years for the next release, or
• You are the author of some of the software sitting on the DVD.

(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...)

DVD drives are only about a hundred bucks.

[AJWM]

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.

Re:DVD drives are only about a hundred bucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

The MPAA gets $15 for every CSS enabled DVD drive sold, you are indirectly funding the MPAA's DVD lawsuits.

Obligatory rewrite of troll's post:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Less than $70, actually.... *BUT*

[AJWM]

old enough to not have the new RPC-2 region controls

Well, there is that. Mine predates those (it was what, anything manufactured after January or February of this year?) but yes, the newer ones will probably have them (or not be able to play DVD movies at all).

Hmm, now if some off-shore DVD manufacturer were to incorporate, say, DeCSS-derived firmware rather than a CCA-licensed version, they'd save the CCA tax and be able to undercut competition. CCA of course would probably try to get the things halted at the borders, it'd make for an interesting court case.

No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.

OT:Backups

[Reality Master 101]

(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.

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