Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Fedora Core 2 released to Mirrors, Bittorrent

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-snag dept.

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."

25 of 429 comments (clear)

  1. Is this the final release or test3? by macnamee · · Score: 0, Interesting

    I don't want to download 4GB for nothing

  2. I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by Noose+For+A+Neck · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Bittorrent seems like an odd way to distribute files for any extended length of time. It wholly depends on how many people are downloading it at any specific moment, so when you come back maybe 3 days later, the download speeds drop to a trickle because you're the only one downloading the file now. And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file - I'm sorry, but relying on people's altruistic behavior is plain stupid.

    Why not put it on a P2P network like eDonkey? People will probably have other downloads moving at the same time, so the particular file will have much more sources for a much longer period of time than with Bittorrent.

    Really, Bittorrent seems like a poor solution to a problem better solved by real P2P software.

    --

    Software piracy is victimless theft.

    1. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by Kevin108 · · Score: 1, Interesting

      The only things to understand about BitTorrent is that it's nearly a free way to distribute something. Why sacrifice your own servers and bandwidth when you can use other peoples'? The other thing to understand is IT'S SLOW AS SHIT. I hate it but a lot of times it's the only way to get things, especially DVD ISOs. Cheap ass distribution companies.

      --

      It's a perfect time for being wasted.
      A perfect time to watch the stars.
      - Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
    2. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Your right, eDonkey and the other sharing tools make ALL the files available in your share folder available whenever you have eDonkey running.

      Because of the decentralised way that torrents work, it would be useless to attempt the same with them. A torrent is available for the duration that one person holds a tracker file open. I love the totrent concept because it means that as well as "flash mod" assistance in getting a file quickly, you are only ever sharing 1 file at a time, and the worst the *AA could do is get you for that one file.

      Treat a torrent like a freshly baked cake - get it while its hot.
      If you miss it, then go looking at the other p2p programs.

      --
      liqbase :: faster than paper
    3. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by dheltzel · · Score: 5, Interesting
      It wholly depends on how many people are downloading it at any specific moment, so when you come back maybe 3 days later, the download speeds drop to a trickle because you're the only one downloading the file now. And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file - I'm sorry, but relying on people's altruistic behavior is plain stupid.

      That's the whole point! After a few days, when everyone already has it, getting the ISO's the conventional way from the mirrors is no problems, but when the ISO's are first out, BT works great.

      And a lot of people (like me) do leave their Torrents run for a while. I throttle the upload (--max_upload_rate) so it doesn't hurt my interactivity much at all and let is run as long as possible, usually several days. I get a good feeling from being altruistic, and I bet I'm not that rare.

      Have you actually tried BT, or just read about it and decided it's not worthwhile? I'm amazed each time I use it. It often starts slow (right now it says it will take 1426 hours to download!) but then it really picks up (I'll be surprised if it takes more than 3 hours, probably less). It's always seemed faster than a straight download, and I'm giving back while getting my "fix". It's a win all around, IMO.

    4. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by noda132 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Bittorrent seems like an odd way to distribute files for any extended length of time. It wholly depends on how many people are downloading it at any specific moment, so when you come back maybe 3 days later, the download speeds drop to a trickle because you're the only one downloading the file now.

      Your observations fly in the face of empirical evidence, which has clearly shown that BitTorrent is in fact the best way to distribute FC2.

      Just because you can't understand it doesn't mean it won't work.

    5. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by dougmc · · Score: 4, Interesting
      BitTorrent blows goats.
      I'm now getting 940 KB/s (kilobytes/s, that's not a typo) down and 870 KB/s up. It should be done in 20 minutes. You'll really have to forgive me if I don't agree that BitTorrent blows goats.

      Granted, I have more bandwidth available to me than you do (work doesn't do much on the weekend, so I've got the full big pipe to myself) but it seems to be doing awfully well.

      You may want to cap BitTorrent's upstream bandwidth to 75% of your upstream bandwidth. For example, if your upstream bandwidth is 128 kilobits/s, cap BT's uploads at 96 Kb/s. The caps put on cable modems are very unfriendly when you actually hit them -- by hitting your upstream bandwidth, you'll typically slow down your downloads to a similar rate. So rather than uploading 128 Kb/s and downloading 768 Kb/s, you'll get 128 Kb/s in both directions. But if you slow your uploads to 96 Kb/s, your downloads can get the full speed of 768 Kb/s. It's kind of wierd, but it's the way the caps work.

      I don't have any experience with DSL -- but it wouldn't surprise me if it works the same way.

    6. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by ChaosDiscord · · Score: 2, Interesting
      It wholly depends on how many people are downloading it at any specific moment, so when you come back maybe 3 days later, the download speeds drop to a trickle because you're the only one downloading the file now. And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file - I'm sorry, but relying on people's altruistic behavior is plain stupid.

      And yet... it works anyway.

      View it another way: I want to release my new Linux distribution (ChaosDiscordLinux 12.0). I've got my own site to distribute it from, and two guys who are willing to run mirrors.

      Option 1: The old school way. I put the files on each site and serve them over HTTP and FTP. The maximum speed I can serve my files at is limited by the bandwidth to those three sites. If I get surprisingly popular, my bandwidth will peg out and things will generally suck.

      Option 2: Bittorrent. I run seed the torrent, as do the other two sites. Now, as a worst possible case people who want to download the file are still limited to the bandwidth of those three sites. However, if there are any surges in demand during those surges everyone downloading starts helping each other. End result: at the worst case it's about the same as the old way, but can potentially be good.

      Is it perfect? No. But it works damn well. One of the benefits is that it looks and behaves like a simple download manager. Not everyone is interested in the details of being on a file sharing network. I don't want an IRC client, to help distribute searches, to potentially share other files. Bittorrent just makes it work. As an added bonus, Bittorrent requires a certain level of accountability; there is a centralized location to send a DMCA takedown request. This makes it much more palatable for various people squeemish with the generally shady looking P2P services.

      I downloaded Red Hat 9.0 months after its release and still found a number of seeds available. It was the fastest ISO download I've ever had. The World of Warcraft beta test is being distributed over Bittorrent and works great. I'm into video games and really appreciate File Rush, which gets me game demos and video footage at lightning speeds. Bittorrent is the only download path I have that regularlly saturates my cable modem.

      --
      Search 2010 Gen Con events
  3. Re:DVD Version? by fostware · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yeah, it can't be that big... Knoppix is one CD has 2.4 and 2.6 kernel, OpenOffice, and a veritable truckload of tools.
    Even with all the different languages, three CDs should be fine.

    --
    "We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
  4. Yum by Moth7 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Anyone know if it's possible to upgrade through Yum repositories? I don't know about you, but after the 3 CDs of Core 1, I'm a bit annoyed at the extra 6 for Core 2 :-\

  5. What about PPC? by imidazole2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Did they release Core2 For the PPC?

    --

    -Imidazole2
  6. smack! -1 Flamebait by big_groo · · Score: 1, Interesting

    And people talk about windows bloat...*sheesh*

  7. I don't... by Phil+John · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...and I know a lot of other people in the community who don't do that, sure some people will turn their client off straight away but then some people on kazaa or whatnot will just turn off sharing and be e leach.

    I've got my bittorrent client (Azureus) running 24x7 but only sharing torrents that need seeders. I stop seeding when there is a seed for every 4 peers (as long as I've upped 50%). When the seed/peer ratio goes down I have Azureus auto start the torrent and continue uploading. This way I give my bandwidth to those torrents that need it most.

    I also leave my computer on at night and since I'm on broadband with no cap I keep it uploading stuff. Hey, I'm paying for always on so I may as well use it, plus I'm not saturating the local loop during the day and pissing off other people.

    --
    I am NaN
  8. Here's a way to save time and disks by Pacifix · · Score: 4, Interesting

    FedoraNews.org has a great tip on installing the isos over NFS . This way you can save yourself a few blank CDs and the actual installation takes no time at all.

  9. Re:Great by cobbaut · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Nobody knows how many people speak English:

    Estimates go as low as 977 million people have notions of English. Or up to 1.5 billion.

    The average googling for "how many people speak English" gets to One in Five in the world. So only 80% of the world has no notion of English at all...

    By the way, Google Zeitgeist shows that about half of their visitors use Googles English interface. So i estimate that about half of the FC2 users will need the 4th CD.

    --
    European Linux user, living in Antwerp
  10. Re:DVD Version? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting
    But you don't need those CD's or DVD. You can get by with the primary install cd, installing enough to get up the bare bones system. Everything else can get downloaded/installed via APT

    The same applies to Fedora.

  11. Triple wammy out to the masses by sheeny · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Finally. KDE .3.2, Gnome 2.6 and kernel 2.6 out to the masses! So much easier than using Konstruct, Garnome etc for most new linux users. Can we consider this the debut of these three technolgies to the masses? I like to think so. I can't wait to install it on my machine, my brothers machine, my mothers machine my.... We should all be proud of the Linux, KDE and Gnome community and send our thanks:) Thank you!

  12. Re:Fedora No Worky! by kunudo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Fedora craps itself when I try to install it on a would-be server with a s3 968 card, in graphic mode, the X server just crashes, in text mode, there's an 'unhandled exception'.... has anyone found a workaround? Checked the RH site & goog... :/

  13. Thanks, Fedora developers! by danpbrowning · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I just want to express my gratitude to the Fedora developers and community for releasing a well-packaged operating system. I upgraded from Fedora Core 2 - Test 3 to the official release via yum, and it has been working great. Very stable, fast, and featureful.

    Thanks again!

    --
    Daniel
  14. ATI? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Any news on a new ATI driver? I'm guessing not.

  15. Re:DVD Version? by Guspaz · · Score: 1, Interesting

    War and Peace is a book, why save them as images? Text makes more sense.

    I downloaded the text version off Project Gutenberg (3.12MB) and RAR'd it. Manually tweaking the compression settings I managed to get it down to 720KB. Throwing in a DOS self-extractor brings that up to 815KB.

    I'm sure the remaining 625KB on a standard diskette would be enough for a barebones DOS, RAM disk executable (for extracting War and Peace to memory for viewing), text viewer, and file system overhead.

    And there you have it. A portable diskette that turns any PC into a lean, mean, war-and-peace-presenting machine!

  16. Fedora: By Adults, For Adults? by reallocate · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been running a Test3 that was updated just after their 7 May freeze. Pretty slick.

    If you're after a noisy, flashy Linux with umpteen ways to play music and videos, Fedora is not for you.

    I you're after a professional piece of work that seems to have been built by adults for adults, look at Fedora.

    --
    -- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
  17. Re:oh don't be silly by mattdm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Of course, Fedora has ed, which blows edlin out of the line-oriented-editor water.

    Actually, I helped a blind woman get set up with Linux last year, and she uses ed exclusively -- her braille terminal is only one line, so something like vi is pointless overhead.

    (PS: busybox, not blackbox, of course. My earlier post was clearly before I had coffee.)

  18. Re:This is a hoax by tuffy · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The MD5SUM file posted here in this forum has a valid Fedora Project GnuPG signature, if you remove the excess spaces. And I've now downloaded the first CD via bittorrent, and the MD5 sum doesn't match... I can only conclude, that this is not the final Fedora Core 2, but a hoax.

    You can't check the md5sums of the ISOs until the entire bittorrent download is complete. Bittorrent makes no guarantee that all of ISO 1 is finished downloading before you start getting ISO 2. It's common for bittorrent to go back and patch "holes" in files near the end of the download - and any gap in the file will mess up your md5sum check.

    --

    Ita erat quando hic adveni.

  19. Re:Great by lokedhs · · Score: 2, Interesting
    That might be true. But I, as a native swedish speaker who also speaks english pretty well, still prefer to use the swedish version of Fedora.

    So I still think the original estimate was pretty good.