“The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of DVD ISO Re-Spins of Fedora Core. These ISOs are based upon Fedora Core and contain all updates released as of the Re-Spin date. They are available for i386 and x86_64 architectures as of Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 via BitTorrent. The x86_64 Re-Spin is currently available for testing only.”
Hey this is good news!. No longer having to download 100s of MBs of updates after the fact. A more up to date version at install is definitely a good thing. Especially the binary compatible kernel being installed by default.
JRM7
Edited 2006-06-05 20:23
Getting a Windows install updated after installing the latest copy from CD takes a long time and usually requires 3-5 reboots. With Fedora it’s a lot easier and faster and now they’ve even streamlined that.
Microsoft needs to spend some of their billions on building better pach/update management into Windows.
One thing they do right though that I wish Fedora would do is classifying updates and not having updates install by default unless they fix a security hole or major stability issue.
This is my free tip for Bill Gates; Create a separate drivers CD, include a default one with the retails Windows package, but have one that is continuously updated on your website. That way, enterprises can always download your latest drivers cdrom and not have to worry about support for RAID, graphics, network, etc. drivers that were released shortly after 2003.
True “enterprises” slipstream updates into their custom installer, or image PCs from a master that is updated by hand.
And the reason why they do this is because Microsoft does not update the drivers themselves. You could do the exact same thing with Fedora Core but it is a lot easier if someone does this already for you. By your analogy, it is better if Microsoft removes all the drivers so that people in true “enterprises” could slipstream everything in there.
Slipstreaming is not enough for you?
I wish more distros did this. This is very helpful for people still on dialup (yes, they are still out there).
nLite
Efficient distribution by BitTorrent is the way to go, I have bandwidth to share and the intent to share it for other people whishing to download Fedora. But with FTP/HTTP servers in the past, there were never any technical possibilities for’helpers’ to assist in improving the download speed for others. With BitTorrent, this has become a reality and download times will be much faster.
Furthermore, it is good to show the great legal uses that BitTorrent (amongst other P2P software) can be put to. I’m sick of the dominant media companies calling BitTorrent and P2P bad names, just because some people put it to ‘copyright-infringing’ uses. Its like calling a hammer a bad thing. (They even use the term “downloading copyrighted material on P2P networks is illegal“ even though this is untrue. – Linux distributions are certainly copyrighted, but are free (freedom/liberty kind of free) to download from BitTorrent and other P2P networks)
Next, it would certainly be great to see continually package-updated distributions. It saves all the hassle of installing then re-downloading and checking what packages you have or re-installing (install and update) twice.
What I’d like to see now is some tweaked variants of FC5 on BitTorrent distribution, for example, with AIGLX / XGL activated by default, or other customizations/recompiles, better less-dumbed down GNOME settings etc. on install. But maybe then, it may no longer be distributable under the name FC5?
I will be contributing to some of these BitTorrents very soon…
Edited 2006-06-06 05:07
Adding custom packages would stop it being FC5, but it isn’t that hard. I have blogged the process.
http://www.users.on.net/~rgarth/weblog/fedora/adding_pkgs.html
I read at distrowatch that this will contain upstream updates that are not part of FC5. The following taken from distrowatch weekly news:
” … quite a few major applications were upgraded to newer upstream versions. These include the Linux kernel (upgraded to version 2.6.16), Beagle (0.2.6), Epiphany (2.14.1), Ethereal (0.99.0), Firefox (1.5.0.3), GIMP (2.2.11), GNOME (2.14.1), K3B (0.12.14), KDE (3.5.2), MySQL (5.0.21) and PHP (5.1.4), just to mention a few popular ones. ”
won’t this break compatibility with applications which assume base versions are the same as FC5?
No, these are what are in the updates for FC5
[justin@kainos ~]$ rpm -qa | egrep ‘kernel|beagle|epiphany|ethereal|firefox|gimp|gnome-desktop|k3b|kdebas e|mysql|php’
gimp-2.2.11-0.fc5.3
php-pdo-5.1.4-1
mysql-devel-5.0.21-2.FC5.1
libbeagle-0.2.6-1.fc5.1
kernel-devel-2.6.16-1.2111_FC5
firefox-1.5.0.3-1.1.fc5
php-5.1.4-1
php-pear-1.4.9-1
kernel-2.6.16-1.2122_FC5
epiphany-devel-2.14.2.1-1.fc5.1
gimp-data-extras-2.0.1-1.1
ethereal-0.99.0-fc5.1
gnome-desktop-devel-2.14.2-1
gimp-help-2-0.1.0.10.0.fc5.1
ser-mysql-0.9.6-6.fc5
gimp-print-4.2.7-16
kernel-2.6.16-1.2111_FC5
beagle-0.2.6-1.fc5.1
yum-kernel-module-0.6-2.fc5
mysql-5.0.21-2.FC5.1
ethereal-gnome-0.99.0-fc5.1
snort-mysql-2.4.4-4.fc5
gimp-print-devel-4.2.7-16
gimp-print-plugin-4.2.7-16
epiphany-extensions-2.14.0.1-1
snort-mysql+flexresp-2.4.4-4.fc5
gimp-print-utils-4.2.7-16
gnome-desktop-2.14.2-1
epiphany-2.14.2.1-1.fc5.1
gimp-print-cups-4.2.7-16
kernel-devel-2.6.16-1.2122_FC5
gimp-devel-2.2.11-0.fc5.3
php-mysql-5.1.4-1
Unfortunately, many servers out there still with CD drives in them, making DVDs no good…