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Shining Arcanine
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 Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 4:58 pm Post subject: Why is there no official torrent for the LiveDVD? |
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I decided to download the LiveDVD to see how quickly I could install Gentoo in a virtual machine using its binary packages. When I went to download it, I noticed that there is no official torrent and the unofficial ones are dead.
Why is there no official torrent for the LiveDVD? |
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AllenJB
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| Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 5:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Because torrents don't work well unless there's a constant large number of seeders. Gentoo already has a well established, reliable network of HTTP and FTP mirrors which can be used by anyone to download at high speed. There's simply no need. |
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Dr.Willy
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Joined: 15 Jul 2007
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Location: NRW, Germany
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| Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 5:40 pm Post subject: |
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| AllenJB wrote: | | Because torrents don't work well unless there's a constant large number of seeders. Gentoo already has a well established, reliable network of HTTP and FTP mirrors which can be used by anyone to download at high speed. There's simply no need. |
Mh - I thought that with torrents you get the download speed of the server plus the parts that you get form other clients.  |
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Shining Arcanine
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| Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 6:17 pm Post subject: |
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| Dr.Willy wrote: | | AllenJB wrote: | | Because torrents don't work well unless there's a constant large number of seeders. Gentoo already has a well established, reliable network of HTTP and FTP mirrors which can be used by anyone to download at high speed. There's simply no need. |
Mh - I thought that with torrents you get the download speed of the server plus the parts that you get form other clients. |
That seems to be the case:
http://www.bauer-power.net/2008/12/how-to-setup-really-fast-dedicated.html
As for the high speed mirrors that Gentoo has, I tried downloading from the official mirror and my download went at about 600KBps when my connection can handle downloads of 3.125MBps (those are megabytes, not megabits). If all of the Gentoo mirrors were seeding torrents, I imagine that my download would have been faster, even without any additional seeds. |
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NeddySeagoon
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Joined: 05 Jul 2003
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Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 7:29 pm Post subject: |
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Shining Arcanine,
There are no binary packages on the DVD that you can use for an install - you have to make your own.
Like this
_________________
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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Shining Arcanine
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Joined: 24 Sep 2009
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| Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 7:57 pm Post subject: |
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neddyseagoon,
I am confused, as according to emerge --help --verbose, you can get binary packages from "CD installs", which I assumed meant the LiveDVD:
| Code: | --usepkg[=n] (-k short option)
Tell emerge to use binary packages (from $PKGDIR) if they are
available, thus possibly avoiding some time-consuming compiles.
This option is useful for CD installs; you can export
PKGDIR=/mnt/cdrom/packages and then use this option to have
emerge "pull" binary packages from the CD in order to satisfy
dependencies. |
My interest in being able to install from binary packages is to be able to tell my classmates that they have the option available if they wanted to try Gentoo without waiting a few days for everything to compile. This interest was brought about by an incident in which I was told that Linux was unsupported on the campus network by my university. Since that incident, I have been interested in getting my peers to switch to Gentoo to give the university more reasons to support Linux. I know that even if I can get 20% of Computer Science majors at the university to switch, the total number of Linux users will likely not exceed 1% of the campus population. Despite that, it would be nice if I were not to be the only Gentoo user on campus, so I was trying to figure out shortcuts to install it quickly. That way I could tell people the shortcuts in the hope that they would be more likely to try it out.
Although now that I think about it, I probably would be better off making a stage4 tarball and distributing that.  |
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NeddySeagoon
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| Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 8:24 pm Post subject: |
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Shining Arcanine,
--usepkg assumes you already have the packages in your /usr/portage/packages dir, or have access to a BINHOST.
The liveDVD is an already installed Gentoo that you boot and run, it does not provide an installer so that things on the DVD may be migrated although that may happen in the 10.2 version.
Neither does it provide a populated /usr/portage/packages, it has no need to as the packages are already installed.
_________________
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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AllenJB
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| Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 8:38 pm Post subject: |
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| Dr.Willy wrote: | | AllenJB wrote: | | Because torrents don't work well unless there's a constant large number of seeders. Gentoo already has a well established, reliable network of HTTP and FTP mirrors which can be used by anyone to download at high speed. There's simply no need. |
Mh - I thought that with torrents you get the download speed of the server plus the parts that you get form other clients. |
You do, but there's not that many people downloading the DVD at any one time (and most of them would stop seeding as soon as it's done anyway, since there would be no real incentive to do otherwise). A decent ftp client or download manager will allow you to create multiple connections, possibly to multiple mirrors, so that you can make full use of your bandwidth, regardless of limits imposed by a single server.
| Shining Arcanine wrote: | | Dr.Willy wrote: | | AllenJB wrote: | | Because torrents don't work well unless there's a constant large number of seeders. Gentoo already has a well established, reliable network of HTTP and FTP mirrors which can be used by anyone to download at high speed. There's simply no need. |
Mh - I thought that with torrents you get the download speed of the server plus the parts that you get form other clients. |
That seems to be the case:
http://www.bauer-power.net/2008/12/how-to-setup-really-fast-dedicated.html
As for the high speed mirrors that Gentoo has, I tried downloading from the official mirror and my download went at about 600KBps when my connection can handle downloads of 3.125MBps (those are megabytes, not megabits). If all of the Gentoo mirrors were seeding torrents, I imagine that my download would have been faster, even without any additional seeds. |
Many mirrors will limit the speed of a single connection / single client, so that all connected clients get an equal share of their available connection.
The problem with your assumption is that, generally, ftp and http mirrors don't do torrent seeding (there are a few exceptions - like mirrorservice.org have plans to possibly run torrents). They leave their bandwidth for the ftp/http users (which will still exist, since the vast majority of Gentoo mirrors are general mirrors that mirror files for other projects - plus there are many users who simply can't use torrents (sanely) due to limits placed on them by their available connection (firewalled connections at universities and work places, limits / throttling imposed by ISPs, lack of available broadband connections).
Gentoo did run torrents before, but in my experience there were generally extremely few seeders, meaning that you could easily get better download speeds from http/ftp mirrors. The problem with torrents is that unless there's some incentive (eg. ratio limits on private trackers), or a torrent is extremely popular, you're going to get very few people who seed. |
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