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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."
Despite all recent negative publicity, Fedora is a great distro for the hobbyist desktop. I've been running FC1 since its release without any problems. I wish they'd stuck to 3 CDs though. IIRC, the 4th CD consists of lots of languages (and nothing else) so most people can skip it. Kernel 2.6, gnome 2.6, kde 3.2... can't wait.
debian has a dvd version
woody is about 7 cds for the i386 binarys alone
test3 came out at the end of April.
this is the final
Use the official torrent when it appears on the tracker:
http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/
A minimal install of FC2 will be 500-something MB.
The "everything" install is considerably smaller than full Debian, which is amazingly (in a good way) comprehensive.
As you well know, your DOS 3.3 floppy had no applications and barely any useful tools. You can do better than that these days with a single (or, okay, probably two) floppy distro with blackbox.
Which you could *make* using Fedora, if you wanted.
emerge -UD world is a very, very dangerous way to upgrade your system.
emerge -Du world is the way to be. the U implies upgradeonly, when really a bad patch could have been applied. -u keeps you at the latest and greatest version. U can very easily break your system, even if you are Johnny Careful.
Unlike traditional P2P, Bittorrent was designed especially for purposes like this: Getting large files out to a lot of a people in a relatively short time. Mirrors simply do not scale for this, and those traditional P2P networks like eDonkey are way too slow for downloading something as large as FC.
I don't know about you, but I actually like being able to download the entire set of ISOs in under 12 hours, rather than waiting the required week for my downloads to finish like on other P2P networks.
oh yeh just as a P.S., the official schedule is here
And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file
I did when downloading FC1. Actually I had forgotten it was running and didn't terminate it until a few days later asked by a system administrator where this BT traffic was comming from. I think their strategy sounds good. The first few days a lot of people is going to download it, so bittorrent is a good choice. And by waiting a few days before opening the HTTP/FTP servers for the public, they get more people using bittorrent and have bandwidth to get it to the mirrors. Of course there will be load on the mirrors when that version is available. But as soon as the load on the mirrors start to decrease you might want to download it that way instead of through bittorrent. Anybody who wants to wait a month or longer before downloading probably isn't going to use bittorrent, but by that time there shouldn't be as much load on the mirrors. There are only two things I'm wondering about. Why doesn't Fedora include the bittorrent client? And why don't they make updates available for download with bittorrent? When a large security update is announced, it is very hard to get a connection to the server.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Were it not for bittorrent, I'd be getting 0 B/s -- because it wouldn't be available at all until they loaded up all the mirrors. And once they did, I'd get about 20 B/s, as they'd all be massively overloaded for a week.
you can start with 35-200 Mb version and get other packages from local mirrors.
It is possible that other distros have similar things too, but only debian talks about it on frontpage.
I've done several debian installs. None of them used official cds. Only netinstall or boot floppies.
No it isn't. May 14 was the release to mirrors date. This is a part of that I understand. It's the real thing.
Apparently there are some systems that yum simply can't handle because it has to update the system while it is "online" (e.g. LVM). So it looks like the answer is "it depends on your set up".
See Seth Videl's post about it. My advice is to wait and see what the pitfalls are since there *will* be gotchas.
...hmm. advogato's being a bit strange today so let me post a quote:
I'm getting an average of 200k. I may have connected at a later time. If you're still not getting fast speeds, try this:
Get Bittornado. If you're getting a yellow lighty it's because you're getting torrents from a firewally. Forward TCP portys 6881-6945 to your system, disconnect, and try againy.
The idea is that the company distributes the torrent have set up a seeder. This way, if nobody besides your are downloading, you'll still get good download rates because you are the only one accessing the primary seeder. If the primary seeder gets overloaded, it wont matter much since your btclient will download from one of the many other client downloading the file.
t ion.htm l
Think of this as a peer2peer accelerated download server, not a peer2peer network.
try giving this a look:
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/introduc
This scalability is the primary reason that mandrake and blizzard is using BT, chances are this why fedora is using it too.
That's all well and good for those of us that know how to do a recompile, but for Joe User it could be a bit of a hang-up.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
Look harder - http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/btrpms/
For FC1 -> FC2 upgrading is NOT recommended using apt, yum or any other depsolver. Anaconda has a fair bit of magic to fix things for you. Most things are manually solvable but if you're using LVM "it has a high chance of blowing up spectacularly" according to the anaconda developers - don't bother unless you like blowing up systems :)
In any case upgrading with anaconda is the recommended way.
So it looks like they recommend getting the install disks and upgrading through the installer.
So does Gentoo.
Please read the following before using an unofficial torrent to download FC2. Apparently, the official release of FC2 is not until Tuesday, and what you are downloading may or may not be the real FC2 release (it may be a Rawhide snapshot, or a trojaned distribution, for example). You can verify the signature on the MD5SUM file to check it, of course, but you'd have to waste your time and bandwidth downloading it first.
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow
tettnang
I've noticed that my download speed can vary rather a bit. It usually starts out quite slow and then kicks up several notches after a while. Also, you can start the official client from the command line with the "--max_upload_rate" argument. I generally set mine to "--max_upload_rate 5". I also use the "tc qdisc" command to limit the maximum outgoing bandwidth to just below my cable modem's upload limit [1].
Most cable modems use a shared pool of resources for incoming and outgoing data and are set to give preference to outgoing packets. If you're running at the maximum upstream bandwidth, your cable modem spends all of its time dealing with those packets and drops incoming data (which severly limits your incoming bandwidth). So, the "tc qdisc" command keeps multiple BT clients from hogging all of my cable modem's resources.
[1] I use `tc qdisc add dev eth0 root tbf rate 200kbit latency 50ms burst 1540`, which I got off of some webpage, don't remember which one now. It works fairly well, I just turn it off (run the command again, with "del" instead of "add") when I need to send data to another computer on my home network.
Other BT clients will only send to you at a very slow rate if they cannot connect back to you to confirm you're sharing.
The reward you get for sharing is that your download will be like 50 times faster.
I've upgraded from FC1 -> FC 2 Test 3 using yum. It basically works, but there are a number of annoying details which I need to fix manually. For instance, sound still doesn't work b/c my laptop's volume keys are deactivated (prob. a 2.6 kernel problem, not a yum problem, methinks).
For people without a CD drive, this is the only way I could figure for installing FC 2. No more boot disks -- the kernel's too big!
So, the bittorrent rpm that's installed on my FC1 system is just a figment of my imagination? The very bittorrent install that's currently downloading FC2? Drat!
Having just written a paper on BitTorrent (which should be presented at PGNET 2004 if anyone cares), a couple of points:
4 /papers/148.pdf that covers things like user-count dropoff.
1. About 20% of people upload at least as much as they download. Which isn't a staggering number (I expected a lot higher), but that's still a reasonable number of people.
2. eDonkey - don't know about you, but I get about 24kbit/s on eDonkey. On BitTorrent, average bandwidth available per user comes out at around 200kbit/s, although I've seen up to 8mbit/s on high-demand torrents.
Oh, and there's another interesting paper at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/pam200
I used yum as installed, unmodified, with the original RedHat/Fedora config:
[development]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - Development Tree
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/p
This, when you run 'yum -y update', replaces this config with:
[base]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/p
[updates-released]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Released Updates
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.co
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
take a look here: http://linux.duke.edu/~skvidal/misc/fc1-fc2-yum-hi nts.txt
No sig for you.
Knoppix does it by using cramfs...
A long time ago I switched from redhat to mandrake. I wonder if it's time to switch back.
I have been a RH customer for a long time, paying for RHN and all, and have found they change their support structure entirely too often. I have RH9 and Fedora 1 on a couple boxes now only because of necessity. As always, RH is a decent "generic" version, with mixed support.
I just downloaded SuSe 9.1 Live, and liked it enough to order a "hand rolled" version. If I like that, I will order their pro version on CD. As a desktop, it appears to blow away the RH versions, IMHO. It is more responsive, more intuitive and better looking. And this is from a Live CD distro. I am looking hard at SuSe to replace everything RH I have now. We will see if I like it well enough in a few weeks.
Since IBM loaned Novell the money to buy SUSE in the first place, I am betting it will end up being the best supported version for the corporate desktop in a year or two, which it lags RH on now. You can download the live CD free at suse.com and try it out. Its different, but as a RH (and formally Mandrake) user, it was nice to fire it up and have everything respond much faster.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The md5sums came out correct for me, and gpg verifies that it has a good signature from "Fedora Project ".
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
In soviet russia, Linux disables your Windows installation.
This indicates that the MD5SUM has been verified correctly with the indicated key
This indicates that gpg can't find a chain of signatures from either your key or from a key marked as 'trusted' in the trust database to this particular key. If you've never signed anyone else's key, or you're never maintained the trust database in gpg, you can pretty well expect to get this message on any file you verify. It's pretty well meaningless unless you've taken steps to use the 'web of trust' features in pgp/gpg. Unless you're really paranoid, I wouldn't worry about the validity of the signature
Can't wait to download and test SELinux, which should work out of the box. It's disabled by default, but you should be able to enable it by adding add "selinux" to the install line when installing. More information: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/selinux/
If anybody was looking for an update without downloading the entire isos to do it, if you have apt, add this to your sources.list: rpm http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/fedora.us/fedora fedora/2/i386 os updates rpm-src http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/fedora.us/fedora fedora/2/i386 os updates rpm http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/fedora/fedora/ fedora/2/i386 os updates rpm-src http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/fedora/fedora/ fedora/2/i386 os updates
The matching by itself only means the latter - that the files you received aren't corrupted.
What gives some confidence that the files are from Fedora is the fact that the MD5SUM file is digitally signed by Fedora's signing key. Once you've installed the Fedora Project's key into your gpg keyring (run
), you can verify this by runningSince the MD5 checksums are digitally signed by the Fedora Project, you can be pretty confident those checksums come from the Fedora Project, and since the torrent files match the checksums, you can be pretty confident that these files come from Fedora.
Grab the new torrent at http://kuix.de/fedora
Actually, if you take a look at it:
* Windows - 1 CD
* MS Office - 2 CDs
* VS.net - 3 CDs if I remember (and you only get 1 interface and 3 languages!)
* Photoshop - 1 CD
* Quicken - 1 CD
* Exchange (? never used it)
* SQL Server 2 CDs (I think - it's been a while)
* WinZIpp - download only
And this is only a small subset of what's available on most Linux distributions.
It's not bloat because (a) you can not load it, (b) even if you load it, it doesn't slow you down unless you run it, and (c) you have the freedom to build your own distribution without it.
Engineering and the Ultimate
First of all, to correct some of the absurd rumor and inuendo running around, yes, these files are genuine and they match checksums signed by the fedora@redhat.com GPG key. So if you can't trust that you can't trust the distributor in general....
Now, for all of the snotty people who were poo-pooing BitTorrent because their downloads weren't going a million megs a second, let me explain precisely why:
YOU WEREN'T INVITED
Y'see, the torrent that got posted to Slashdot was never intended for widespread consumption. The tracker was hosted on an individual's home DSL via a java client and simply wasn't expected to handle the load of widespread usage. Once the hordes of gimmie gimmie kiddies showed up it fell right over. Repeatedly. No wonder you couldn't get a decent transfer rate and your connections were timing out. Then, to make matters worse, half of the people who started connecting in the first big wave decided to disconnect and throw their downloads in the trash. Boy, that's going to help a torrent with one seed just a whole bunch. And again, let's remind ourselves: YOU WEREN'T INVITED.
So now there's a new tracker and faster seeds and things are moving along nicely. And now you're invited. I'm sure you won't disappoint us by disconnecting your client the instant your download is done.
http://kuix.de/fedora/
Thank you for your patience and cooperation.
fedora.redhat.com is still showing test 3. That seems odd to me. Why would some other site have the release version before the project's site?
Well, the schedule states that:
14 May Release to mirrors (morning)
18 May Release open, announced
So it's been released to mirrors by now, but the official release is not until tomorrow.
The four days are to make sure that every mirror is synchronized so everyone opens up at the same time which will, hopefully, prevent 'em from getting swarmed. This is probably a leak from one of those mirrors.
Am I just being paranoid?
As for being paranoid, that's a healthy attitude to take with everything downloaded from an anonymous torrent. Heck, everything downloaded from the internet for that matter. Checking GPG signatures and MD5SUMS should show if it's a real deal or something else.
ftp://ftp.gaminguk.net/Mirrors/fedora_FC2_bittorre nt_cd_iso/