“Today I pushed out a new ISO of my Wayland Live CD project, which is named for my favorite celebrity. For this new Wayland CD, I wrote a new login manager with Bash and Zenity and Expect (and Script) that fully runs on a Wayland server (weston). Now X is no longer involved in the boot process, and X does not start, (unless you use an X application with xwayland), because I replaced LightDM with the new loginmanager.”
1.7 GB and no torrent? Who’s gonna download that? I’m certainly not. Files >= 500 MB should always have a torrent (even if there is only one web seed and no other seeder). Some people don’t have a very fast internet connection. Some people’s internet has regular connection drops. So for “them” it is impossible to download files >= 500 MB via HTTP.
I agree with you in case point. But magnet+dht is the future.
Megaupload.com ?
Kochise
That makes me sad. I think I’d cut my wrists if my provider would be so crappy.
Then never move to Austria.
I’ve used “rural broadband” WiMAX ISPs where I wouldn’t even think of trying to download a 500MB file with a browser. That said, I’ve used wget to transfer multi-GB files over those same connections (wget -c –timeout=10 –tries=100 http://somedomain.com/somefile.blah) & I find that works much more reliably.
Download managers?
I know Firefox can resume a download.
This assumes that the server supports range requests. While these days all major and a lot of minor web servers support this, using a better protocol (like bittorrent) that has this as a central feature is IMHO a better solution.
The only problem is, BitTorrent has a tendency to outright hog all the bandwidth it can, with the capability of bringing any network connection to its knees. And not always download at the maximum connection speed at the same time. And I’ve seen many, many torrents download 99%… and then just quit right there. Multiple clients.
HTTP/FTP tend to allow me to download reliably at the maximum possible connection speed. All you need is a decent mirror. Really, it is incredibly rare that I find a server that doesn’t support resuming… and even for those that don’t, most of the time I’ll never know because I don’t get a broken connection. And if I do, the automatic retries prevents the problem from getting to the point where it it comes to my attention.
In my experience, BitTorrent’s supposed benefits don’t outweigh its negatives… and it’s not often that I see a plain old HTTP/FTP server fail as badly. 404 not found is the worst I’ve seen, but in BitTorrent land I’ve seen torrents that never take off as well.
IMO what BitTorrent is best for are:
-Large files that cannot be downloaded in any other way–but *only* for a short period of time, because if you don’t hurry up and download it while it’s hot you’re screwed. You could end up with insanely slow download speeds and a torrent that may just stop downloading and never finish up. Not cool… no fun at all. I’ve had some download at decent (not great) speeds and as soon as a seed goes offline, the download drops to an excruciating slow speed that never picks back up.
-Collections of many larger files that will not compress very well to begin with, that would otherwise be put in an archive anyway. In this case, it’s nice that BitTorrent allows you to pick what files you want and skip the rest, and you don’t have to extract a bunch of files from what could be poorly archived into a zip bomb or something similar.
Edited 2013-05-29 03:06 UTC
In theory, it can. In practice, I’ve found more often than not that Firefox will just restart a partial download from the beginning when I try to resume.
Since I’ve come to expect that, I usually make a duplicate of the .part file before trying to resume in Firefox – so when it almost-invariably fails to resume the transfer, I can just copy the download URL and resume the transfer using wget with the -c option (which has almost always worked IME).
As far as I remember, this has never worked with failed downloads: you can only start over from the very beginning, even if the server does support resume.
Firefox’ DownThemAll extension does it right, though.
Edited 2013-05-27 06:59 UTC
Weird I have accidentally closed Firefox while downloading and it just resumes when I start it again. It does not redownload.
That’s not really failure though, because Firefox stays in control of what happens all the time, unless you have brutally killed it or something similar.
What I call failure is those situations where the network connection itself is quite unreliable (think being far away from a WiFi hotspot or using a cell connection). In my experience, in this situation, Firefox will advertise the download as being either failed or (worse) completed even if it isn’t.
Edited 2013-05-28 05:52 UTC
To be fair I prefer using Bitorrent when getting disc images just because it does some parity checking of some sort.
md5sum -c [checksums.md5]
sha1sum -c [checksums.sha1]
sha256sum -c [checksums.sha256]
sha512sum -c [checksums.sha512]
…
I am sure we are all aware of that, but Bitorrent does it as it goes along. It is more convenient.
You should be able to download with wget -c.
Well, at these data sizes I’d rather have checksums for each several MB so I can be sure that the reconstructed whole is not broken and if something is amiss I only have to redownload a few MBs.
You might like PAR2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
In your situation, I’d rather have a half-decent internet provider.
Well there isn’t any. I would need to move. There is no cable anywhere near here, we only get ADSL (pppoa!). Currently I only have 3 Mbps down stream. The maximum that I could have in the area where I live is 8 Mbps. Changing the provider would not help, because if there aren’t better lines in the ground, well there aren’t any better lines in the ground.
Only 3 Mbps? Luxury, luxury! Oh, we used to dream of a connection that fast! In my day, we connected our web servers with nothing but a rotary phone and an accoustic coupler modem… over a party line!
</Four Yorkeshiremen>
Seriously though, my sister lives in a semi-rural area & the fastest connection available there is 1.5 Mbps down/0.5 Mbps up (WiMax) – with the only alternatives being satellite (slower and more expensive), 2G (MUCH slower and more expensive), or dial-up.
Edited 2013-05-27 00:39 UTC
And when the download was at 99.99% our dad would slice the line in half with a knife!
What does it say about me that I recognized the reference at “luxury, luxury”?
That you’ve watched a lot of Monty Python
Meh… I download files that are several gigs in size over HTTP/FTP all the time with wget–in fact, that’s actually my preferred method. It works just fine and is reliable without destroying network speeds. It’s just that, in this case, a distro named “Rebecca Black Linux” that runs Wayland is something I probably wouldn’t bother downloading with any type of connection…
I would…but only on Friday.
I bet the calendar app in that distro is really awesome.
magnet:xt=urn:btih:1AA1B14ACC94B4086A2CB42CA0BBD1D124C23276&dn=Rebecca BlackLinux_i386.iso&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent. com%3a80%2fannounce
Enjoy, However, I set limit to 100KB/S to not use all of my free bandwidth on amazon.
Edited 2013-05-26 18:07 UTC
Thank’s but I just get “invalid bittorent link”.
Hmm it looks like a filtering on the forum is breaking the link. Try to copy from here. http://snipt.org/Aahaj1
I’ve got a fiber connection and I am in Switzerland. I’ll try to setup a torrent for you. First time I’m doing thqt, though, I hope I’ll succeed.
Is http://ge.tt/4SMDRjh/v/0?c working for you?
Seems to be working for me. uTorrent asked whether I wanted to add trackers from your torrent file.
I created .torrent with webseeds, so it also downloads from original source.
[edit] Nvm it seems to have a different checksum somehow.
Edited 2013-05-26 22:21 UTC
Thanks.
My computer is a bit noisy, I’ll cut it for the night. I’ll start it again tomorrow morning around 07:00 Geneva Time.
Edit: I just noticed your remark about checksums. I’ve got no clue. Is there a checksum available from the first-party, the author?
Edit 2: got it :
4fd5391bc2f28037c9e321ca2d011bd9ee0e112c (SHA1)
found by clicking the (i) on http://sourceforge.net/projects/rebeccablackos/files/May%2024th…
Edited 2013-05-26 22:30 UTC
No, I meant my torrent file and magnet link create two separate torrent downloads for some reason. While my torrent and your torrent file seems to add trackers from each other when I execute them.
uTorrent shows hash as a42ee42b83fb357504d10b006cc73c848397b764 but its probably different type.
Edited 2013-05-26 22:33 UTC
The author’s favorite celebrity is Rebecca Black, who happens to be 15. I’m guessing he/she is around the same age?
Kids these days. Wow…
Something tells me its much, much creepier than that…
But it shouldn’t be a surprise anymore. There are grown man with beards who like little girl show about ponies. Google “bronies”
Maybe I’m in denial, but I still refuse to believe that the whole “brony” thing is anything other than hipster-irony gone overboard. Basically, the Web 2.0 equivalent of the “Lumber Cartel” or “Cabal” jokes from Usenet (conspiracy theories that people would ironically pretend to believe in).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumber_Cartel
A guy I work with grudgingly admitted a while back that his college-age son is a high ranking member of the Atlanta area Brony club. He said he suspects it’s a ploy by his son to “get girls interested in him”.
The kid is an engineering genius, and nerds are big with the ladies these days. Somehow I don’t think it’s about getting a date. Some guys just take that show completely seriously.
And who am I to judge anyway? I greatly enjoyed watching Sex and the City in my early 20s, and that’s something most guys would never admit to even if their spouse made them watch it (and I wasn’t married then).
I can’t imagine that would work very well. Hell, my sister is probably even more cynical about the whole “brony” thing than I am – and she watched the original cartoon back in the 80s (and owns 4 horses, for that matter). Though it could be because she’s had a few students who were bronies, and who very quickly became disillusioned when they realized that real horses aren’t actually cuddly cartoon characters.
Oh yeah – and hell, we typically give trekkies & comic book fans a pass
Though it’s not really the “girliness” of MLP that strikes me as odd, so much as the fact that there’s such a large adult fanbase for a show intended for 5-10 year olds.
It is a bit of a joke distro that has been around for a while.
That it’s been around for a while does reduce the creepiness factor. Quite the opposite really.
Grr. That should have been “does NOT reduce the creepiness factor.”
I don’t get the Brony thing at all, but it at least seems mostly harmless… Assuming these guys don’t get into fistfights over which pony is more awesome, or whatever.
One would certainly hope so – or least hope that he/she meant “favorite” in an ironic sense… I honestly have a hard time believing that there are any genuine Rebecca Black fans out there.
Then again, back in 2003-2004 I worked with a guy in his early 20s who was practically obsessed with Miley Cyrus…
Haha… That last sentence gave me the lulz.
I don’t think Wayland is the future, from what i’ve seen it’s quite complicated. Let’s hope the Ubuntu’s effort “Mir” is better.
“I don’t think Wayland is the future, from what i’ve seen it’s quite complicated.”
Please elaborate …
Edited 2013-05-27 18:16 UTC
Wow! 42 comments on a site title OSNews, and not a single comment about actually testing the LiveCD, or experiences using Wayland, or anything even remotely technical.
Has anyone actually tried the LiveCD yet? Has anyone actually played with Wayland/Weston?
Nobody can, apparently, because they all live in BFE with no decent internet connection. Didn’t you read the first 25 comments?
I tried it on VMware with 3D acceleration and it was so glitchy that I closed it after 1-2 min of using it.
Yup, if I were the person who had produced this liveCD, I would be slashing *my* wrists over the fact hardly anyone has made a comment directly about the Wayland experience available through it.
I have no tried this particular distro but I’m using Wayland as my primary display server on my Fedora installation (Fedora 20/rawhide). It works perfectly well.
This video shows nicely how big difference Wayland makes on Raspberry Pi: http://www.collabora.com/videos/rpi-wayland-demo-720p.webm
Edited 2013-05-27 18:19 UTC
That’s impressive, and I’d really like to think that Wayland will make such a difference; the current stack is a mess. However, I couldn’t help but notice how he used two different distributions in the video, where the graphic server might not be the only difference. Also, he could have used composition under X as well, though I don’t know how much difference would that have made.
I’m pretty sure it’s the same distribution (Debian) but the desktop/graphics system is different. First he uses LXDM on Xorg and then desktop-shell (Weston module) on Weston/Wayland.
Edited 2013-05-28 17:13 UTC
The obvious effect in the video is because Wayland/Weston does compositing. In X11 without compositing, you get to see redraws all over the place. With compositing, no redraws. You can get the same results using ‘xcompmgr -a’ in X11.
I’ll be more impressed if windows can resize smoothly with all the compositing effects. Window resizing on Linux has been terrible since GTK+ started using Cairo for everything.
Hmmh, it would be interesting to know how big changes we should be expecting to rendering speeds with any graphics libraries / toolkits.
All I can say at the moment is that the rendering windows, tilting, zooming, etc. on my Atom is really fast (60fps) and without hiccups and tearing. Butter smooth.
Edited 2013-05-31 05:41 UTC