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."

Comments

I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[Noose For A Neck]

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.

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[dheltzel]

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.

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[noda132]

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.

Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing...

[dougmc]

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.

Yum

[Moth7]

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 :-\

What about PPC?

[imidazole2]

Did they release Core2 For the PPC?

I don't...

[Phil John]

...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.

Here's a way to save time and disks

[Pacifix]

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.

Re:Great

[cobbaut]

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.

Fedora: By Adults, For Adults?

[reallocate]

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.

Re:oh don't be silly

[mattdm]

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.)

Re:This is a hoax

[tuffy]

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.