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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."

88 of 429 comments (clear)

  1. Great by arvindn · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Great by iamsure · · Score: 2, Informative
      Not having english as your official language is one heck of a long distance away from "cannot speak one word in English".

      Some googling found..


      According to research by the British Council, "English has official* or special status in at least seventy-five countries with a total population of over two billion. English is spoken as a native* language by around 375 million and as a second language* by around 375 million speakers in the world. Speakers of English as a second language will soon outnumber those who speak it as a first language. Around 750 million people are believed to speak English as a foreign language


      That puts the number at over 1.5 billion people able to speak "one word in english" at least.

      Thats ignoring the "most computer users speak english" argument.

      So yeah, I'd say for a decent number of people, CD #4 can probably be skipped.
      --
      GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
    2. Re:Great by maxume · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This comment is in no way insightful. Come on. Sure, major chunks of India/China/Europe don't speak English as thier primary language, but they are more than likely to known at least a word or two. Throw in the fact that many of the people who don't have computers are probably the same ones who don't speak any english, and the situation just continues to deteriorate.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
    3. 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
    4. Re:Great by JanneM · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "knowing a word or two" != "wanting to run the destop in English". I speak, read and write English fluently, and I prefer to have my desktop in Swedish anyway - together with support for Japanese, as I am studying the language.

      --
      Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
    5. 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.

    6. Re:Great by blixel · · Score: 2, Funny

      really, do most people speak english ?

      Sí, Oui, Ja, Sim, ,

    7. Re:Great by Pharmboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No PPC version. Fedora only supports the various i386 flavours. Redhat used to support Alpha and Sparc, but I think they dropped everything but i386/i64/amd64 a few versions back.

      Try yellowdoglinux.com for a PPC version of Linux. Or OS-X ;)

      --
      Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
    8. Re:Great by DJStealth · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Since Slashdot, to my knowledge, is completely in English. I would guess that 99% of people reading these comments will NOT NEED the 4th CD. (However, some may want it if they speak other languages as well)

    9. Re:Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Debian supports more archs than any other linux distro, which also includes PPC.

  2. DVD Version? by TheLoneCabbage · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You know in my day DOS3.3 still fit on one 1.44 floppy!

    I know it's a test platform but do they need to include a test copy of war and peace with EVERY release? Does anyone have a particulary clever reason (besides source disks) why it needs to be this frigging big?

    This is one of the big reasons I switched to Debian, I didn't want to get sadled with a multigig *BASIC* install. No flame wars, please, but for my personal taste I can't fathom RH any more.

    --
    I would rather be ashes than dust!
    1. Re:DVD Version? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      debian has a dvd version
      woody is about 7 cds for the i386 binarys alone

    2. 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
    3. Re:DVD Version? by tokul · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    4. 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.

    5. Re:DVD Version? by maxbang · · Score: 2

      Not my version. I scanned in each page at 1200 dpi and saved them as tiff files. Now I pine for the day when Apple releases the iRead version of the iPod, or at least for the day when I realize my brain is 95% harvati cheese.

      --
      I also reply below your current threshold.
    6. Re:DVD Version? by mikis · · Score: 2, Informative

      So does Gentoo.

    7. Re:DVD Version? by maxbang · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Perhaps that extra 625KB could be used to store a sense of humor :)

      --
      I also reply below your current threshold.
    8. Re:DVD Version? by BlowChunx · · Score: 2, Informative

      Knoppix does it by using cramfs...

  3. Re:Is this the final release or test3? by boardumb · · Score: 5, Informative

    test3 came out at the end of April.
    this is the final

  4. 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 Junta · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But it scales at worst case no worse than http/ftp so long as the hosting providers normally providing http/ftp allocate equal resources to serving bittorrents. When you are the only user of an http/ftp site, you get satisfactory speeds, so bittorrent would do fine for that scenario. Times like this where http/ftp services would crumble under the load, bittorrent offloads the work effectively and yields better download speeds than http/ftp do when there is only one client.

      The thing with bittorrent is that you can get a small seed from an official source and be more assured that the content you are downloading is, in fact, what you want and not a trojan with the same name that turned up on some P2P network search. MD5 sums can help this, but it means in the event of an incorrect download, you've wasted your time and bandwidth. BitTorrent provides a distribution method with more verifiable authenticity before downloading than most P2P networks, and that is very valuable for this application.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    2. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by RickHunter · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file

      Yup, that's right folks. The 400+ seeds you often see for hours on newly-released anime digisubs are ALL people recruited by the fansubbing groups. NONE are just regular downloaders who leave their clients open. Not one. Yes, this means that fansubbing groups must be in excess of a couple thousand people each.

      Get a clue. Its regular behavior to leave a BT client open for at least an hour afterwards. Not only that, but you don't have to have a complete copy of the file to upload. BT clients exchange bits of the file, so you're uploading while you're downloading, which saves on the bandwidth provided by the clients used to "officially" seed a file. Despite what you say, in practice, BT works quite well - people are willing to be altruistic because the protocol rewards them for it.

    3. 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
    4. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by dougmc · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Bittorrent seems like an odd way to distribute files for any extended length of time.
      Perhaps, but it's an awesome way to distribute them when six gazillion people want something large the moment it comes out. FC2 definately falls into this category right now.

      And even once the initial flood of demand has been satisfied, it scales at least as well as downloading via a web or ftp site -- and much better if two or more people are downloading. FC is popular enough that it will probably have at least two people downloading (probably many more) it at any given time until FC3 comes out.

      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.
      You're wrong. People DO leave their BT clients open longer than needed to download the file. Some people do have extra bandwidth to spare, and some will leave it open just because they saw it was going to take 4 hours to download, so they went to bed and didn't come back for 10 hours.

      And even if they don't, it still works, because they were uploading while they were downloading.

    5. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by kasperd · · Score: 2, Informative

      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?
    6. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by dougmc · · Score: 2, Informative
      The other thing to understand is IT'S SLOW AS SHIT. Hardly. I regularly get 200 KB/s+ (bytes, not bits) downloads from bittorrent downloads. Right now, I'm getting 55 KB/s for FC2 -- not that fast, but then again I just started it up. I fully expect it to pass the 200 KB/s mark before it's done.

      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.

    7. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by rokzy · · Score: 2, Funny

      >people are willing to be altruistic because the protocol rewards them for it.

      just a nitpick - that's not altruism.

      how does this reward work? ATM I'm downloading at 4KiB/s and up at 30KiB/s, generally I upload twice as much as I download. where's my "reward"?

    8. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by justins · · Score: 2, Insightful
      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.

      Well, you're also relying on the fact that a lot people aren't going to be sitting at their computer waiting to turn off bittorrent the instant the download is complete.
      --
      Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
    9. 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.

    10. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by klevin · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    11. 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.

    12. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by Eric+Smith · · Score: 3, Insightful
      And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file
      Maybe you don't, but that doesn't mean that nobody does.

      When I downloaded fc2test3, I got it in just over an hour, but I left the BT client running for another 12 hours, and the stats show that it uploaded almost 10x as much as it downloaded.

      Why not put it on a P2P network like eDonkey?
      Nothing is stopping you, or anyone else, from putting it on any P2P network you like.
      Really, Bittorrent seems like a poor solution to a problem better solved by real P2P software.
      Bittorrent was designed to solve the problem of distributing files that are in high demand. It does this better than most other P2P software, so I'd conclude that Bittorrent is an excellent solution.
    13. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · · Score: 2, Informative

      There are no rewards - none! It's digital communism, it doesn't work.


      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.
    14. 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.

    15. Re:I never understood the Bittorrent thing... by Xugumad · · Score: 4, Informative

      Having just written a paper on BitTorrent (which should be presented at PGNET 2004 if anyone cares), a couple of points:

      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/pam2004 /papers/148.pdf that covers things like user-count dropoff.

    16. 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
  5. The OFFICIAL torrent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    Don't download a potentially hacked version of FC2 from unknown sources identified by ip numbers only.

    Use the official torrent when it appears on the tracker:

    http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/

    1. Re:The OFFICIAL torrent by Guanix · · Score: 4, Informative

      I wouldn't worry. MD5sums signed by the Fedora project are included with the images.

    2. Re:The OFFICIAL torrent by mukund · · Score: 4, Informative

      The MD5SUMs are cryptographically signed using the Fedora project's PGP key.

      --
      Banu
  6. oh don't be silly by mattdm · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:oh don't be silly by TheLoneCabbage · · Score: 4, Funny

      Take that back!

      DOS 3.3 had Edlin!

      And if you subscribe to the theory that the simpler something is to use, the less functionality it had... Well Edlin was the most usefull editor EVER!!!

      You kids and your fancy electrons!

      --
      I would rather be ashes than dust!
    2. 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.)

  7. 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 :-\

    1. Re:Yum by Blarfy_Snarflepoop · · Score: 2, Informative

      take a look here: http://linux.duke.edu/~skvidal/misc/fc1-fc2-yum-hi nts.txt

      --
      No sig for you.
  8. Re:Does anyone ever stick with their current insta by dleifelohcs · · Score: 2, Insightful

    newer things. better versions. faster. bugfixes. security fixes.

    I can keep going if you like.

    there are plenty of reasons to upgrade your operating system and/or kernel.

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

    Did they release Core2 For the PPC?

    --

    -Imidazole2
  10. Re:Instead of upgrading your Fedora... by dleifelohcs · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  11. Uh No! by leerpm · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  12. Re:Is this the final release or test3? by boardumb · · Score: 2, Informative

    oh yeh just as a P.S., the official schedule is here

  13. Troll, but I'll take the bait... by Moth7 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As a user who migrated my box from FC1 to Gentoo 2004.1, emerge world is all well and good - once you have the thing installed. After the luxuries of anaconda, untarring and compiling the whole system yourself is somewhat tiresome and you are bound to get most of it wrong the first time.
    Don't get me wrong, I am a devout Gentoo convert and wouldn't use anything else now, but for someone coming from the graphical handholding of Fedora, the Gentoo install is like walking blind. And heaven help you if you didn't print off the install manual - better hope those Fedora disks are still lying around for you to get your internet connection back after attempt #1.

  14. 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
  15. 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.

  16. Re:Is this the final release or test3? by M1FCJ · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  17. Depends on your configuration by Sits · · Score: 3, Informative

    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:

    Wrote up some not-yet-finished notes on how to yum update from FC1 to FC2 with relative ease. I'll post a link here when I'm happy. It's not a hard process and for most people it'll work fairly ok. For some people, however, for example, people using LVM, there are certain things yum just can't do, and there is no nice way around it on a running system. This is where anaconda is the only way to do it. Since it is running outside of your installed system it can muck with things w/o worrying about making its environment completely unusable.
  18. where to get bit-torrent RPM? by dankelley · · Score: 2
    I am running Fedora Core 2 Test 3, so I figured it might make sense to upgrade to the official release. (BTW: FC2T3 is pretty well-constructed, so I'm guessing FC2official will be fine.) For fun, I decided to try Bit Torrent.

    Unfortunately, when I followed the story's link to bit torrent, and then looked for a bit torrent RPM for to use on my Fedora system, I learned that ... there doesn't seem to be such an RPM available.

    I guess I'll be downloading this Fedora update in the old-fashioned way.

    1. Re:where to get bit-torrent RPM? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
      and then looked for a bit torrent RPM for to use on my Fedora system, I learned that ... there doesn't seem to be such an RPM available.

      Look harder - http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/btrpms/

  19. Indeed you haven't understood bittorrent ;p by dmouritsendk · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    Think of this as a peer2peer accelerated download server, not a peer2peer network.

    try giving this a look:
    http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/introduct ion.htm l

    This scalability is the primary reason that mandrake and blizzard is using BT, chances are this why fedora is using it too.

  20. NVIDIA by hawkeyeMI · · Score: 4, Informative
    Be warned! If you use the NVIDIA binary drivers, they didn't work with FC2-test3 due to the use of the 4k stack option in the kernel. Unless that's changed in the final (I doubt it) you will have to recompile the kernel to use the NVIDIA drivers.

    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
    1. Re:NVIDIA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      A new nvidia driver is expected soon which will be compatible with Fedora, possibly in a few weeks. Unfortunatly when your dealing with closed source binary drivers these are the types of things that happen. I agree its not the most pleasant situation but as long as there are closed source vendors out there these types of problems will continue to come up. New users should stick with the opensource nv drivers until Nvidia makes their drivers compatible.

      This again is yet another example of why binary drivers are problematic. You won't hear me say don't use them, or were better off without them. People still need these features no matter what the license. But this situation just reinforces how important having a truly free desktop is. You should be able to install your OS, get all of your hardware working, get on the Net, send and recieve email, and work on Office documents ALL with FOSS software. If proprietary closed source software is required for any of the above then the FOSS movement has failed. That's most users can't seem to grapse. Imagine 5 years from now and needing closed source drivers for every single piece of hardware. The kernel devs would be at the mercy of hardware makers and no new features could be added because they might each break some other OEMs hardware. The ONLY reason things work as well as they do now is becaus devs can fix the old code and drivers as new code and features are added to the kernel.

      It can be argued that this patch was ill advised and they should have stuck with 8k for now. There I won't argue because its a valid point. I just wanted to point out that the situation wasn't as simple as "Red Hat broke Nvidia's drivers", end of story. Not that the parent was ever implying that.

      Recent dicussion on the issue

      http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF -8 &safe=off&threadm=1UPNn-3Wt-3%40gated-at.bofh.it&r num=2&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dfedora%2520nvidia%25204k% 26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3 DN%26tab%3Dwg

    2. Re:NVIDIA by Brian+Stretch · · Score: 4, Informative

      FWIW, 64-bit Fedora doesn't require a kernel recompile to use the nVidia closed-source drivers, but you do need the driver patch from minion.de. You'll also need to add "alias char-major-195 nvidia" to /etc/modprobe.conf, or modprobe nvidia manually. Don't forget to make the usual changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Anyhow, I've been running 64-bit UT2004 under FC2 Test 3 for a while now and it works great, after getting the beta version mentioned here (hopefully there will be an official UT2004 upgrade soon?).

      It's great to see x86_64 Linux on equal footing with 32-bit x86 Linux. If you've been waiting for an excuse to switch over to AMD64, now's the time.

  21. Re:smack! -1 Flamebait by afd8856 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Check out the future Longhorn :) I bet you will get an entire new understanding of the "bloat" concept... And don't tell me you'd rather download emacs, openoffice, kde (or gnome) and everything else, just because you want it all on one cd... (BTW, checkout Slackware 9.1, it's very nice distro on one cd...)

    --
    I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
  22. 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!

  23. 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... :/

  24. 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
  25. Apparently not recommended on fedora-list by Ars-Fartsica · · Score: 4, Informative
    Quoted from fedora-list:

    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.

  26. Please read before using above torrent by YellowBook · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  27. So the real question is........ by rsax · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Has anyone actually verified that these ISOs are legit by using the Fedora GPG key?

    1. Re:So the real question is........ by jjohnson · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
  28. Re:The question by weinberg · · Score: 3, Informative

    tettnang

  29. 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"
  30. Re:Too bad BitTorrent doesn't run on Fedora Core 1 by Oloryn · · Score: 2, Informative
    The upgrade path would have been a bit easier if it was possible to run BitTorrent on Fedora Core 1. But you can't.

    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!

  31. Re:For the beta testers (FC2 Test3) by Kevin+Burtch · · Score: 2, Informative


    I used yum as installed, unmodified, with the original RedHat/Fedora config:

    [development]
    name=Fedora Core $releasever - Development Tree
    baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu b/fedo ra/linux/core/development/$basearch/

    This, when you run 'yum -y update', replaces this config with:

    [base]
    name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base
    baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu b/fedo ra/linux/core/$releasever/$basearch/os/

    [updates-released]
    name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Released Updates
    baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com /pub/fedo ra/linux/core/updates/$releasever/$basearch/

    --
    - Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
  32. 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.

  33. Re:smack! -1 Flamebait by dcstimm · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah If windows came with every application under the sun it would be 4 cds too, Remember linux can fit on a 16kb flash card, but since fedora wants to package every known linux application with their release, they have huge install cds..

    --
    keanmarine.com
  34. check by oKilgorEo · · Score: 4, Informative
    not sure if i'm missing something here but it looks to check out
    SlavaSoft Optimizing Checksum Utility - fsum 2.5
    Implemented using SlavaSoft QuickHash Library <www.slavasoft.com>
    Copyright (C) SlavaSoft Inc. 1999-2003. All rights reserved.

    OK MD5 FC2-i386-disc1.iso
    OK MD5 FC2-i386-disc2.iso
    OK MD5 FC2-i386-disc3.iso
    OK MD5 FC2-i386-disc4.iso
    OK MD5 FC2-i386-rescuecd.iso
  35. Blazzing by houseofmore · · Score: 2, Funny

    So sitting on the back of our office T1 and getting 79 bytes a second.

    Est finish time: 2443:08:30.

    Woowoo!

  36. Re:how does it compare to mandrake? by Pharmboy · · Score: 2, Informative

    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!
  37. Re:Are you a corporate shill? by reallocate · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Of course not, silly boy.

    >> ...users who value ease of use over and in place of technical merit, and users who themselves lack the technical prowess to develop more effectivve and efficient computing practices but still wish to identify themselves with an elitist technical community.

    First of all, no conflict exists between ease of use and technical merit. Deleting a file using "rm" or with a mouse get you to the same place and do the same thing.

    Second, the technical community, if there is one, is no more elite than the marketing community, or the realtor community, or the barber community. The elitism in the tech community is bogus, and primarily finds expression in the arrogance many of its members express toward anyone else. It's rather like someone prancing around arguing that people who drive cars with autotmatic transmissions are trying to "leverage" a little glory from the "elite auto mechanic community".

    >>...they are rightly the target of ridicule in the legitimate FOSS technocrat community

    For using the same damn software that's in every other bleeding Linux distribution? Fedora drops a couple mp3 players, uses a Gnome theme that doesn't glow in the dark, and gets beat up for it. By some nonexistent "legitimate FOSS technocrat community".

    >> The Redhat: Fedora Core product is for users who:
    # Would prefer to use the tools prescribed for them by others or by default in their corporate environment.

    Well, like I said, it's the same damn software. And, if your boss owns the hardware, your boss gets to "prescribe" the software that's on it.

    # Value a shiny, flashy system initialization screen where essential details are hidden by a pretty picture.
    It's not shiny or flashy. It's rather dark and blue and it just sits there and does nothing. ANd those intitialization details are not essential to a user, who won't understand them anyway. They get paid to work, not understand Linux messages.

    --
    -- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
  38. CAREFUL IF YOU DUAL-BOOT FC2 and XP! by cpu_fusion · · Score: 3, Informative
    Some users of FC2-test3 discovered that, unlike FC1, it will render your coexisting Windows XP partitions unbootable. This may possibly be limited to certain hardware configurations, but it's hard to say with no official word from the Fedora team on a fix for this, despite it having been in bugzilla since at least the test 2 release.

    In soviet russia, Linux disables your Windows installation.

  39. Re:WARNING: This key is not certified with a trust by Oloryn · · Score: 3, Informative

    Just finished downloading the iso images from the bittorrent link. Public key verification doesn't look good.

    gpg --verify ./MD5SUM
    gpg: Signature made Thu 13 May 2004 01:25:04 PM MDT using DSA key ID 4F2A6FD2
    gpg: Good signature from "Fedora Project "

    This indicates that the MD5SUM has been verified correctly with the indicated key

    gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
    gpg: There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.

    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

  40. SELinux by daserver · · Score: 3, Informative

    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/

  41. Apt sources by SockMonster · · Score: 2, Informative

    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

  42. Re:Bad MD5Sums here... (awe suck!) by Oloryn · · Score: 2, Informative
    My ISO files match the md5sum file included, but does that mean that they are really from fedora? Or does it just mean that the ISOs I have are the ones that were inteneded to be sent over the torrert...ie. no corrupted files?

    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

    gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 4F2A6FD2
    ), you can verify this by running
    gpg --verify MD5SUM

    Since 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.

  43. Re:smack! -1 Flamebait by johnnyb · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
  44. New, working torrent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  45. Re:Why isn't this on fedora.redhat.com by juhaz · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  46. FAST MIRROR of bittorrent cd iso images by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    ftp://ftp.gaminguk.net/Mirrors/fedora_FC2_bittorre nt_cd_iso/