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Canonical Halts Ubuntu CD Free-for-all
Barence writes to tell us that Canonical plans on limiting the number of "free Ubuntu CDs" that people can mooch from the company. The growing popularity of Ubuntu has seen a dramatic increase in the number of CDs being shipped via the free "ShipIt" scheme. The only people able to take advantage of this program now will be the usual community teams, contributors, and first-time Ubuntu users. "'While these CDs are often referred to as 'free CDs,' they are of course not free of cost to Canonical. We want to continue this programme, but Ubuntu’s growth means that some changes are necessary. Therefore we are adjusting how we handle CD requests to try to find the right balance between availability of CDs and the continued viability of the ShipIt program,' [Canonical's chief operating officer Jane Silber] adds. Extra CD copies of Ubuntu will still be available for purchase through the Canonical store, although they need to be bought in bulk. Five copies of the open-source operating system will cost £5 exc VAT and shipping."
You should try Fedora, imo it's a lot better than Ubuntu/Debian. And it's backed by Red Hat, which is a lot larger and older than Canonical.
Gentoo?
He said we wants to get work done, not tweak or play around with crap. Any major distro would be better suited than Gentoo.
It's been many years since I had to contend with a modem, but I sure remember the magical 5kB/sec that you can realistically expect to get from the so-called 56k modems (really 53000 bits per second, a byte is really 10 bits (8 data, one start, one stop) comes to pretty close to 5000 byte/sec) which comes to 18MB/hour. If a CD is 600MB (some are more, some are less) then that would be 33 hours of continuous download through a 56k modem.
Assume less than 100% duty cycle, occasional phone calls, somewhat less than optimal connections -- you fire up the torrent on Monday and by Friday you have the ISO on your harddisk (especially the ISO of a torrent as blazingly fast as Ubuntu, which tends to have a Godzillion seeds about three minutes after it's released).
What was your problem again?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.