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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/
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.
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.
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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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.