Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the stress-those-pipes dept.
mkool writes "Exactly on schedule.
Fedora Core 2 is now officially available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent."
Thanks, if not for your link, posted to a discussion forum website, I might not have been able to locate a forum where I could discuss Fedora Core 2.;p
Any way to update from Fedora Core 1 without downloading the.isos?
Yes, but none are supported. With apt, I've done it like this
1. manually download and upgrade (not install) the redhat-release package (although it may now be called fedora-release)
2. update the/etc/apt/sources.list file to point to the repo for the new release
3. apt-get upgrade
4. apt-get install kernel
5. reboot
6. apt-get dist-upgrade
7. reboot
8. done
The first time I did this was with up2date, which is why the redhat-release package had to be done explicitly first, it's probably not necessary with apt. This is not a supported upgrade path, even with yum or up2date (which both have the distribution upgrade feature), but many people do it with much success.
Dont anyone try getting it
by
Timesprout
·
· Score: 4, Funny
till I have finished downloading the DVD iso on my dialup connection.
I will find anyone who does and make them install Win ME as retribution.
-- Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth What truth? There is no dupe
unofficial mirror
by
happyfrogcow
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I saw a mention that straight RPM upgrades are strongly discouraged. Upgrade from CDs, or do a net upgrade.
-- People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
Leaked .torrent Matches
by
Kalak
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The md5 sums match the "leaked" torrent, so if you have that, there is no need to re-download even to join the official torrent by getting the.torrent and renaming your directory appropriately.
-- I am, and always will be, an idiot.
Karma: Coma (mostly effected by.hack)
Say what you will about Fedora/Red Hat, but I've set up 2 Fedora boxes recently for 2 people who have never used Linux, and they've both remarked how well it looks and works. Keep up the good work guys!
-- this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Fedora Core 2 is FAST!
by
nsandver-work
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I downloaded Fedora Core 2 using the.torrent that was posted yesterday, and it's fast. Very fast. The combination of the 2.6 kernel, and updated GNOME flies on my P-III 600 compared to FC1. Menus appear in probably half the time they did before, as do Nautilus windows. Download and enjoy! And 'thank you' to the crew who work on Fedora!
Re:Fedora Core 2 is FAST!
by
Jon+Pryor
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Nautilus isn't faster because it's spatial. It's faster because it uses file extensions for MIME-type checking instead of file sniffing. This greatly increases performance, as the disk doesn't need to be accessed for every file in a directory. This is particularly noticable if your directory has thousands of files...
File sniffing is still used in two circumstances:
When the file lacks an extension, such as README or configure.
When the user opens the file. The sniffed MIME-type is compared to the file extension, and if there's a mismatch, Nautilus complains loudly. This is to help prevent trojans, such as a shell script named README.txt, which would imply being a text/plain MIME type but are actually application/x-shellscript.
Re:shameless karma whoring
by
chadm1967
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Would have been a hell of a lot easier to just type:
http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html
Bench marks? Reliability?
by
www.sorehands.com
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Have there been benchmarks done between Federora and RH 8/9? Is so, where are they? How is reliability as compared to RH 8/9?
The key question is why switch if it is working? And if there is something worthwile, how long should one wait (when things are considered stable) until they switch?
Re:Bench marks? Reliability?
by
ChangeOnInstall
·
· Score: 4, Informative
My primary work use of my computer is Java development, typically using Eclipse+Tomcat, but with a reasonable chunk of general purpose stuff (web/email/office) too.
RH8 was very good to me, very few problems. I was surprised given the amount of new stuff that went into it.
RH9 was okay once I figured out that somehow my Athlon 1100/motherboard/memory had bit the dust. (It was crashing every night at 4:02am running updatedb until then).
FC1 is about the best Linux I've ever used. The only problems I've encountered are: Nautilus likes to crash way too often. Evolution is a little more unstable then I'd like (I almost think it's annoyed at some of the wacky things spammers stick in messages). The updater didn't work out of the box. Work machine has a 174 day uptime (meaning it hasn't been rebooted since it was installed). Home machine's uptime indicates day I moved into current residence.
FC2 is now running on my laptop. No problems yet, but i've only used it for an hour or so. I will say that I'm quite pleased to see that when I plugin in my USB flash card reader, an icon shows up in Nautilus' "Computer" folder. When I unplug it, it goes away. It seems to at least run Java and Eclipse with no issues yet.
too bad no firewire
by
treat
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Too bad there is no firewire. Although in bugzilla it was marked as blocking the release, clearly someone thought that it was more important to stick to the schedule than to have working drivers. Firewire worked fine for me with vanilla 2.6.0, so it is quite sad to not see it working in the Fedora release.
Especially since 2.6 fixes a lot of hot-swap problems, I'm worried how many new Linux users will try this out and be quite disappointed when firewire does not work at all.
Re:too bad no firewire
by
TheRaven64
·
· Score: 4, Informative
According to the test list, FireWire support was very buggy and caused a lot of systems to have problems even when FireWire was not in use. It was decided better to not include it, since that would cause fewer problems for most people.
Bug When Dual Booting Windows XP and Fedora Core 2
by
cbowland
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Be sure to watch out for this one. It has already caught some folks here unaware.
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?i d=115980
--
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
Mod story +1 Funny
by
menscher
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
mkool writes "Exactly on schedule.
Yes, exactly on schedule. Right. Did you not notice that their schedule was revised about 5 times along the way? I remember the release date being for May 3 at one point.
Or perhaps this was a subtle attempt at humor?
That said, I'm really looking forward to trying it out. It's a real mess trying to decide between RH9+legacy, FC1, FC2, RHEL, and WhiteBox. Oh, how I long for the simple days of RH9!
Two things worth noting....
by
HunterWare
·
· Score: 5, Informative
a) Per bugzilla bugs 113202 and 115980 people are getting corrupted partition tables after installing FC2 (and the previous test versions). This is a known bug, but the release shipped anyhow... (wierd)
b) NVidia drivers don't work with this release do to a kernel patch (the "4K Stack" patch). Seems to be an even split on who should fix this, but the end result is no nvidia drivers for people using this release (at the moment).
Re:Two things worth noting....
by
Thagg
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The 4KSTACK change is inevitable, unstoppable, and also foreshowed long in advance. There are too many benefits, especially when running large numbers of threads.
NVidia will release a new driver compatible with 4KSTACKS soon. It's a pity that they aren't available now, because Fedora Core 2 looks like a very exciting distribution otherwise.
Thad Beier
-- I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Re:What's new?
by
TheRaven64
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
2.6.5 kernel. Not sure about the rest. Oh, and don't install it (dual boot) on a machine running Windows XP without a full backup, since it has been known to make XP unbootable without wiping the partition table and starting again. This problem is being investigated, and there's a fairly active flamewar on the fedora-test list about it.
Has anyone else noticed that a Google search on Total Disaster returns Fedora Core 2 as the #2 hit? It was #1 last week. Hopefully this release will push us even further away from such an undignified title.
Re:shameless karma whoring
by
GundyRage
·
· Score: 5, Informative
While the web page doesn't show it (http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/), the torrent is ready. Now jump on so I can get faster downloads;) http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/tettnang-binary-i386 -iso.torrent
Newbs read below...
Just cd to the directory that you want the download to start in. Make sure you have at least 2.2 Gigs free on that partition, and run the command below. It will be slowish at first but it will pick up with time. The --max_upload_rate is the maximum kB/s you will upload to others. Use it if your connection is bit sensitive. If you couldn't care less, leave it off and help the rest of the world out.
Get bittorrent here: http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download. html Or for RH / Fedora users: http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/btrpms/
Command for FC2 bittorrent: [user@system dir]$btdownloadcurses.py --url http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/tettnang-binary-i386 -iso.torrent
That might save the newbie a google or two.
P.S. The above was just cut from an email I sent to a local LUG.
G
nVidia driver HOWTO
by
DennisZeMenace
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There are many forums out there that will explain in great details. For example, see here.
The fast version: the Nvidia driver will NOT work with FC2's kernel because of the 4KSTACKS problem. Unfortunately, FC2's kernel no longer has the config option to disable this new "feature", so you will need to:
- recompile a new kernel (i.e. a stock kernel). For example, 2.6.5-bk2, or 2.6.6-bk4
- make sure to use Fedora's own config files (from/usr/src/linux-2.6.5-1.358/configs), and turn off the options CONFIG_4KSTACKS and CONFIG_REGPARM
-DZM
Re:How reliable is Bittorrent?
by
TheRaven64
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The.torrent file contains hashes for each of the sections in the file. If you download corrupted sections, you will get them again. If your file is corrupted then the next time you start the client it will scan the file to see which bits have been downloaded correctly and re-fetch the ones that have not.
Re:Bug When Dual Booting Windows XP and Fedora Cor
by
GundyRage
·
· Score: 5, Funny
This can be avoided by not dual booting to Windows. Not booting to Windows is also known to have other positive side effects.;)
Lighten up - Its a joke.
G
Re:very useful
by
TheRaven64
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Every single byte in a file affects the MD5Sum, making it very difficult to modify a file and have the MD5Sum remain constant. This is even more difficult if you want to include something specific in the file (like a trojan), since you would need some garbage to compensate (and a nice big supercomputer to work out exactly what that garbage should be). On the other hand, perhaps you have a simple way of doing it. If so, perhaps you could give me a string (of any length) which matches the following MD5Sum:
Fedora inlcudes support for apt and yum. I use yum and I love it. Handles all your dependencies for you. Give it a try. It will make you happy.
Re:getting around the IP blocks
by
pyros
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I know there is are several commonly used tools that are ommited from fedora to avoid the IP issues. playing DVDs, Samba and a couple of others. Does anyone have a link to howto on what needs to be installed after the install to make it a regular useful distro?
Samba is included, as is the new CIFs driver which replaces smbfs. What isn't included is the NTFS read-only driver module, which you can download as a binary RPM from linux-ntfs. As for the other stuff, I like to use the fedora.us + livna.org* repositories. There is also freshrpms, ATrpms, Dag Wieers, and Planet CCRMA. There are others, and be warned that Dag Wieers and Axel Thim (atrpms) are in a pissing match over Dag obsoleting at least one of Axel's packages for naming it "wrong". (look at the April acrhives of the freshrpms mailing list with some fresh popcorn).
* - The livna.org front page still says they are down and lists the mirror. The rpm.livna.org repo is actually back up, they just never bothered to update the main page to say so.
The yum package manager comes with FC and you can easily add apt, if you prefer it to yum; both these tools take care of all dependencies and will download and install all necessary packages automatically (ex: if you tell yum to install packageA and this one needs packageB and packageC, yum will get and install all three for you). Using either from the command line is quite simple, once you've pointed to a repository in their config files (the one I use is freshrpms.net, which has apt and yum repositories which includes all the base files plus extra packages that are not included, such as DVD players, mp3 support, etc.; you will also find simple instructions to use all these goodies).
In the case of yum, you add this to/etc/yum.conf: (check on freshrpms.net for their sample yum.conf files)
Next up is the up2date thing. I've lived in RPM hell since the Redhat 4.0 days, and I'm not really sure why I still endure it. By now, the fact that I still can't get a DVD or MP3 player installed with a simple command line statement or GUI tool is simply absurd. It's generally a multistep proecess: download foo-3.3-2.rpm for five minutes, try to install it to find out it depends on bar-1.2-3.rpm, so I download that for another five minutes, try to install that to find that baz-0.2-23-monkeychowder.rpm depends on bar-1.2-2.rpm and that by installing anything more recent, I'm just screwed. Am I the only person that finds this completely unacceptable?
Yes, you are. Because everyon else has already figured out by now that not only does up2date support apt and yum repositories, but RH also ships yum as part of fedora. Look here for a list of repos who support both apt and yum. You can add these sources to/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources and use up2date for automagic dependency resolving across repos to install new packages and upgrade existing ones. To get a GUI that supports external repos you will have to go with apt/synaptic though. The up2date GUI only supports upgrades (not installation or removal, and I know the CLI supports installation and removal, I'm talking about GUI only now). There is no yum GUI that I know of.
Re:Bug When Dual Booting Windows XP and Fedora Cor
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You can joke all you want about not caring about windows booting, but the bug is potentially more serious than just not booting windows. It is very likely that bug is the same as this one: Bug 113201
Basically, you can get a screwed up partition table. It appears this is due to changes in the way that the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel reported hard disk geometry. These changes were not account for yet (to my knowledge) in parted, which is used in the FC2 install. This results in inconsistent (between FC2 and other OS'es, perhaps more than just windows) entries in your partition table.
I don't know how likely it is that this will cause a problem on any given machine. Perhaps for smaller disks the way the 2.4 vs 2.6 kernels report geometry will be the same, and there will be no problem. You might want to try to boot into a 2.6 kernel based live CD and compare values to what you see in a 2.4 kernel before installing FC2. For more information on this, see this thread:
This is a very serious problem, which sadly appears to have been known about for some time, and no warnings have appeared in any release notes (much less delaying releases to fix it). You can note the distress of some reporters in the bugzilla comments. I am distressed that the problem has gone unfixed this far, and more distressed about the very little attention it has gotten. I am not going to install FC2 until this is dealt with.
anti-slashdotting
by
hey
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I starting download using BitTorrent around 10:00am ET when it was official released but the download rate was horrible (like 5 KiB/s). Then arround noon it got really fast (like 200 KiB/s)!!! What happened?! That was when this article was posted on Slashdot so I had more peers to talk to - maybe the first reverse slashdotting ever.
Re:So... Not so sure
by
ahaning
·
· Score: 5, Informative
As someone else mentioned, you'll need to forward at least ports 6881 to 6889 (or 6999 if you feel the need) from your router to your PC. Each window you open needs its own port.
You may also need to figure out how to get through your firewall, if you have one.
Regarding your question: BitTorrent does work through routers even if your ports are "closed", but in order for you to download anything, someone else's ports must be open. You are uploading at such a high rate because someone else has their ports open.
If everyone's ports are closed, no one will be able to connect to each other and nothing will happen. If the seeder's ports are open and all of the leecher's ports are closed, the leechers will not share with each other and you'll be back to having a very slow FTP site (basically).
If you open your ports, you will see drastically higher speeds. You may also want to limit your uploads a bit since you need some upload bandwidth to be able to download. Your PC needs to be able to tell the other peers that it got the pieces that they sent.
HTH.
-- Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Re:very useful
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Informative
A hash collision in MD5 has, to the best of my knowledge, been found.
It represented a considerable amount of work - even if the 128-bit hash was perfect, the workfactor would have been 2^64, and collisions in the compression function were found to affect the balance, thus slightly weighting the probabilities and allowing for a search on the order of 2^58; still a considerable amount of work and it took a couple of years.
I'd link the PDF, but it's gone walkabout; you should be able to find the precursors without too much trouble though.
Of course, that's just a birthday attack (find a pair of files, neither given, any length, with same md5sum), and it's just one time. You'd have to do it all over again to find another pair.
The attack presented here (given md5sum, find or pad file to match) is not currently feasible. That's workfactor 2^128 and it doesn't look like the compression function weaknesses can really help (much) - the work would be over 2^100, quite impossible today.
MD4 is weaker (as it exposes the compression function problems). SHA-1 is stronger (not least because it is a 160-bit hash, giving 2^80 birthday). RIPEMD-160 is also pretty good, as is TIGER192, and you can't discount the new breed of SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512.
Repartitioning on 2.6 kernels can result incorrect partition table for Windows boot and they stop booting. Mandrake 10 and SUSE 9.1 have the same problem. There is more information and potential solutions on this site.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone got a mirror?
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Fedora Core 2 Discussion, I've found that site to be very helpful.
Any way to update from Fedora Core 1 without downloading the .isos?
till I have finished downloading the DVD iso on my dialup connection.
I will find anyone who does and make them install Win ME as retribution.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
is here ;)
go ahead! mod me offtopic, but we'll see who laughs la&^&!71&$@*[NO CARRIER]
I saw a mention that straight RPM upgrades are strongly discouraged. Upgrade from CDs, or do a net upgrade.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
The md5 sums match the "leaked" torrent, so if you have that, there is no need to re-download even to join the official torrent by getting the .torrent and renaming your directory appropriately.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
Say what you will about Fedora/Red Hat, but I've set up 2 Fedora boxes recently for 2 people who have never used Linux, and they've both remarked how well it looks and works. Keep up the good work guys!
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
I downloaded Fedora Core 2 using the .torrent that was posted yesterday, and it's fast. Very fast. The combination of the 2.6 kernel, and updated GNOME flies on my P-III 600 compared to FC1. Menus appear in probably half the time they did before, as do Nautilus windows. Download and enjoy! And 'thank you' to the crew who work on Fedora!
Would have been a hell of a lot easier to just type:
http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html
The key question is why switch if it is working? And if there is something worthwile, how long should one wait (when things are considered stable) until they switch?
Fight Spammers!
Look here at Wikipedia
It has something to do with beer:
Fedora devel mailinglist
Too bad there is no firewire. Although in bugzilla it was marked as blocking the release, clearly someone thought that it was more important to stick to the schedule than to have working drivers. Firewire worked fine for me with vanilla 2.6.0, so it is quite sad to not see it working in the Fedora release.
Especially since 2.6 fixes a lot of hot-swap problems, I'm worried how many new Linux users will try this out and be quite disappointed when firewire does not work at all.
Be sure to watch out for this one. It has already caught some folks here unaware. http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?i d=115980
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
Yes, exactly on schedule. Right. Did you not notice that their schedule was revised about 5 times along the way? I remember the release date being for May 3 at one point.
Or perhaps this was a subtle attempt at humor?
That said, I'm really looking forward to trying it out. It's a real mess trying to decide between RH9+legacy, FC1, FC2, RHEL, and WhiteBox. Oh, how I long for the simple days of RH9!
a) Per bugzilla bugs 113202 and 115980 people are getting corrupted partition tables after installing FC2 (and the previous test versions). This is a known bug, but the release shipped anyhow... (wierd)
b) NVidia drivers don't work with this release do to a kernel patch (the "4K Stack" patch). Seems to be an even split on who should fix this, but the end result is no nvidia drivers for people using this release (at the moment).
2.6.5 kernel. Not sure about the rest. Oh, and don't install it (dual boot) on a machine running Windows XP without a full backup, since it has been known to make XP unbootable without wiping the partition table and starting again. This problem is being investigated, and there's a fairly active flamewar on the fedora-test list about it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
See this link for details.
Has anyone else noticed that a Google search on Total Disaster returns Fedora Core 2 as the #2 hit? It was #1 last week. Hopefully this release will push us even further away from such an undignified title.
While the web page doesn't show it (http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/), the torrent is ready. Now jump on so I can get faster downloads ;) http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/tettnang-binary-i386 -iso.torrent
. html
6 -iso.torrent
Newbs read below...
Just cd to the directory that you want the download to start in. Make sure you have at least 2.2 Gigs free on that partition, and run the command below. It will be slowish at first but it will pick up with time. The --max_upload_rate is the maximum kB/s you will upload to others. Use it if your connection is bit sensitive. If you couldn't care less, leave it off and help the rest of the world out.
Get bittorrent here:
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download
Or for RH / Fedora users:
http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/btrpms/
Command for FC2 bittorrent:
[user@system dir]$btdownloadcurses.py --url http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/tettnang-binary-i38
That might save the newbie a google or two.
P.S. The above was just cut from an email I sent to a local LUG.
G
There are many forums out there that will explain in great details. For example, see here.
:
/usr/src/linux-2.6.5-1.358/configs), and turn off the options CONFIG_4KSTACKS and CONFIG_REGPARM
The fast version: the Nvidia driver will NOT work with FC2's kernel because of the 4KSTACKS problem. Unfortunately, FC2's kernel no longer has the config option to disable this new "feature", so you will need to
- recompile a new kernel (i.e. a stock kernel). For example, 2.6.5-bk2, or 2.6.6-bk4
- make sure to use Fedora's own config files (from
-DZM
The .torrent file contains hashes for each of the sections in the file. If you download corrupted sections, you will get them again. If your file is corrupted then the next time you start the client it will scan the file to see which bits have been downloaded correctly and re-fetch the ones that have not.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This can be avoided by not dual booting to Windows. Not booting to Windows is also known to have other positive side effects. ;)
Lighten up - Its a joke.
G
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Fedora inlcudes support for apt and yum. I use yum and I love it. Handles all your dependencies for you. Give it a try. It will make you happy.
Samba is included, as is the new CIFs driver which replaces smbfs. What isn't included is the NTFS read-only driver module, which you can download as a binary RPM from linux-ntfs. As for the other stuff, I like to use the fedora.us + livna.org* repositories. There is also freshrpms, ATrpms, Dag Wieers, and Planet CCRMA. There are others, and be warned that Dag Wieers and Axel Thim (atrpms) are in a pissing match over Dag obsoleting at least one of Axel's packages for naming it "wrong". (look at the April acrhives of the freshrpms mailing list with some fresh popcorn).
* - The livna.org front page still says they are down and lists the mirror. The rpm.livna.org repo is actually back up, they just never bothered to update the main page to say so.
The yum package manager comes with FC and you can easily add apt, if you prefer it to yum; both these tools take care of all dependencies and will download and install all necessary packages automatically (ex: if you tell yum to install packageA and this one needs packageB and packageC, yum will get and install all three for you). Using either from the command line is quite simple, once you've pointed to a repository in their config files (the one I use is freshrpms.net, which has apt and yum repositories which includes all the base files plus extra packages that are not included, such as DVD players, mp3 support, etc.; you will also find simple instructions to use all these goodies).
/etc/yum.conf:
u x/$rel easever/$basearch/core
l inux/$rel easever/$basearch/updates
a /linux/$rel easever/$basearch/freshrpms
In the case of yum, you add this to
(check on freshrpms.net for their sample yum.conf files)
[core]
name=Fedora Linux $releasever - $basearch - core
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/lin
[updates]
name=Fedora Linux $releasever - $basearch - updates
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/
[freshrpms]
name=Fedora Linux $releasever - $basearch - freshrpms
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedor
To update all packages, you just type:
yum update
To install a new package:
yum install packagename
To install multiple packages starting with the same name:
yum install package*
To remove a package:
yum remove packagename
Hope this helps.
De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum
Yes, you are. Because everyon else has already figured out by now that not only does up2date support apt and yum repositories, but RH also ships yum as part of fedora. Look here for a list of repos who support both apt and yum. You can add these sources to /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources and use up2date for automagic dependency resolving across repos to install new packages and upgrade existing ones. To get a GUI that supports external repos you will have to go with apt/synaptic though. The up2date GUI only supports upgrades (not installation or removal, and I know the CLI supports installation and removal, I'm talking about GUI only now). There is no yum GUI that I know of.
You can joke all you want about not caring about windows booting, but the bug is potentially more serious than just not booting windows. It is very likely that bug is the same as this one:
Bug 113201
Basically, you can get a screwed up partition table. It appears this is due to changes in the way that the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel reported hard disk geometry. These changes were not account for yet (to my knowledge) in parted, which is used in the FC2 install. This results in inconsistent (between FC2 and other OS'es, perhaps more than just windows) entries in your partition table.
I don't know how likely it is that this will cause a problem on any given machine. Perhaps for smaller disks the way the 2.4 vs 2.6 kernels report geometry will be the same, and there will be no problem. You might want to try to boot into a 2.6 kernel based live CD and compare values to what you see in a 2.4 kernel before installing FC2. For more information on this, see this thread:
This is a very serious problem, which sadly appears to have been known about for some time, and no warnings have appeared in any release notes (much less delaying releases to fix it). You can note the distress of some reporters in the bugzilla comments. I am distressed that the problem has gone unfixed this far, and more distressed about the very little attention it has gotten. I am not going to install FC2 until this is dealt with.
I starting download using BitTorrent around 10:00am ET when it was official released but the download rate was horrible (like 5 KiB/s). Then arround noon it got really fast (like 200 KiB/s)!!! What happened?! That was when this article was posted on Slashdot so I had more peers to talk to - maybe the first reverse slashdotting ever.
As someone else mentioned, you'll need to forward at least ports 6881 to 6889 (or 6999 if you feel the need) from your router to your PC. Each window you open needs its own port.
You may also need to figure out how to get through your firewall, if you have one.
This site might prove helpful, if it is up.
Regarding your question: BitTorrent does work through routers even if your ports are "closed", but in order for you to download anything, someone else's ports must be open. You are uploading at such a high rate because someone else has their ports open.
If everyone's ports are closed, no one will be able to connect to each other and nothing will happen. If the seeder's ports are open and all of the leecher's ports are closed, the leechers will not share with each other and you'll be back to having a very slow FTP site (basically).
If you open your ports, you will see drastically higher speeds. You may also want to limit your uploads a bit since you need some upload bandwidth to be able to download. Your PC needs to be able to tell the other peers that it got the pieces that they sent.
HTH.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
A hash collision in MD5 has, to the best of my knowledge, been found.
It represented a considerable amount of work - even if the 128-bit hash was perfect, the workfactor would have been 2^64, and collisions in the compression function were found to affect the balance, thus slightly weighting the probabilities and allowing for a search on the order of 2^58; still a considerable amount of work and it took a couple of years.
I'd link the PDF, but it's gone walkabout; you should be able to find the precursors without too much trouble though.
Of course, that's just a birthday attack (find a pair of files, neither given, any length, with same md5sum), and it's just one time. You'd have to do it all over again to find another pair.
The attack presented here (given md5sum, find or pad file to match) is not currently feasible. That's workfactor 2^128 and it doesn't look like the compression function weaknesses can really help (much) - the work would be over 2^100, quite impossible today.
MD4 is weaker (as it exposes the compression function problems). SHA-1 is stronger (not least because it is a 160-bit hash, giving 2^80 birthday). RIPEMD-160 is also pretty good, as is TIGER192, and you can't discount the new breed of SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512.
Repartitioning on 2.6 kernels can result incorrect partition table for Windows boot and they stop booting. Mandrake 10 and SUSE 9.1 have the same problem. There is more information and potential solutions on this site.