I decided to grab it just to see what's in it. Turns out their servers are *slow*. Of their 5 servers (US, Europe, China, Japan, and "Global"), the best speed I could get was something like 30KB/s, which means it'd take over a day to pull down that 1.2GB. These guys need to invest in some Amazon S3.
OK, I've got it (the server sped up after 5:00 or so). It's an RAR file which contains an ISO image. (I'm not sure why they didn't just ship the ISO itself; putting it into RAR saved a whopping 17M, or 1.3%, and RAR support isn't easy to find on Linux. Zip would've been OK.) And, yeah, the ISO image is a LiveCD of Xandros, including some development tools (e.g., gcc, Eclipse, the Linux kernel source, QT Designer). Oh, and unrar, which is getting pretty recursive.
I haven't booted it yet, though; it's late, and I don't feel like rebooting my machine. I'll feed it to qemu in the morning.
OK, I've got it running, and, yeah, it's just a stock Xandros distribution with a few development tools and a 48-page PDF on developing for the Eee. They didn't even bother to add icons for the development tools to the desktop or the panel; they're buried in the menus as if this were a general-purpose distro.
I wonder if they realize that distributing Xandros means they're obligated to provide source for all its GPL components?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
John Stracke @ Mar 26th 2008 11:27AM
I decided to grab it just to see what's in it. Turns out their servers are *slow*. Of their 5 servers (US, Europe, China, Japan, and "Global"), the best speed I could get was something like 30KB/s, which means it'd take over a day to pull down that 1.2GB. These guys need to invest in some Amazon S3.
Rex @ Mar 26th 2008 1:09PM
Torrent would also be a good solution considering that many Linux Distros are also released that way.
John Stracke @ Mar 26th 2008 1:15PM
Wouldn't help me; I'm stuck on Comcast.
phanbouy @ Mar 26th 2008 7:31PM
use the RC4 encryption option thru Azureus
John Stracke @ Mar 26th 2008 9:26PM
@phanbouy: Thanks, that worked.
John Stracke @ Mar 26th 2008 10:30PM
OK, I've got it (the server sped up after 5:00 or so). It's an RAR file which contains an ISO image. (I'm not sure why they didn't just ship the ISO itself; putting it into RAR saved a whopping 17M, or 1.3%, and RAR support isn't easy to find on Linux. Zip would've been OK.) And, yeah, the ISO image is a LiveCD of Xandros, including some development tools (e.g., gcc, Eclipse, the Linux kernel source, QT Designer). Oh, and unrar, which is getting pretty recursive.
I haven't booted it yet, though; it's late, and I don't feel like rebooting my machine. I'll feed it to qemu in the morning.
John Stracke @ Mar 27th 2008 11:46AM
OK, I've got it running, and, yeah, it's just a stock Xandros distribution with a few development tools and a 48-page PDF on developing for the Eee. They didn't even bother to add icons for the development tools to the desktop or the panel; they're buried in the menus as if this were a general-purpose distro.
I wonder if they realize that distributing Xandros means they're obligated to provide source for all its GPL components?