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UNIX
(mostly Linux) setup
Getting Started
Starting with a Windows machine
for getting the downloads?
Download and install Burst! a Windows client
for bittorrent! What’s bittorrent? A very smart network
scheme which starts a download from a number of other computers and then as you
get data you start to share it out to them and others. Want more technical
details? Try looking here.
Why use bittorrent?
Well, most of the files needed
to make a fully functioning Unix system with applications range in size from
13MB for Mozilla, to 70MB (for Open Office) to 3 “CD”s for Mandrake Linux which
are all about 660MB in size (that’s about 1.9GB). FTP downloads are OK for
files up to 20MB on the whole, but going bigger nearly always results in broken
downloads and (in general) no resumes. Provided you have a good broadband link
(DSL or Cable), bittorrent will just keep on going & going until the
download is complete.
How do I find the code I
need to download using bittorrent?
First go to the web site of the
source of the code. If you’re lucky you’ll find bittorrent files there. If not,
do a Google search for them using bittorrent & the “product” name. What you
need to do first is download a small file ???????.torrent of about 50k in size
using a normal download. Also download the matching md5sums files. What
are these? Well, the files downloaded by bittorrent are huge, so even
with careful error checking and piecing back together of the original files,
errors can and do happen.
A brief diversion here!
This’ll lengthen the process,
but go and get the Knoppix version of Linux first. Why? It has a particularly
good installation system which will detect working, non-working and unworkable
hardware. Why download Mandrake (the full edition) when the platform you have
targeted isn’t going to be a good subject?????
Once I have the download(s)
finished, what do I do next?
Make sure that in each of the
Blast! Windows that it says that the download is 100% complete. You should now
have ISO standard files. Go and get the program md5sum.exe from the internet.
Then run it on each of the downloaded files to make sure that the (very long)
checksums agree. If they don’t, you have a problem and you’ll have to download
the bittorrent file again.
OK, I’ve got the ISO files
tested, now what?
Now the potentially hard part!
Make sure that you have a CD-RW drive that will reliably (with it’s software)
write a full 700MB CD-R without stopping and giving errors and wasting discs.
Mine won’t do it, so if you have to, move the code over a network to a known
good drive & software combination and blow the discs there. Nero is
rumoured to be the better choice above EasyCD Creator and I tend to agree with
this having seen several systems behave in the same way.
What Now?
Take a running machine and feed
it the Knoppix Linux CD you made. You should be able to boot through and
hopefully find that the chosen machine is OK with it. If it is, pull out the
Knoppix CD and put in the Mandrake Disc No. 1. (make sure that you labeled them
when you made them! As the startup proceeds select just about everything you
think you’ll need. If you don’t, you’ll be spending time later installing a
whole lot of stuff anyway. Install KDE for sure and don’t install any other
desktop GUI.
What about adding more
applications?
On the second and third ISO
discs there are many of the applications that you might require, rather than
having to download them again from the Internet. Of course, depending on the
release date of the OS, will decide which versions of some of these
applications you’ll get. Example: Current distribution of Mandrake at this time
is 9.2, but it has Mozilla 1.4 supplied on the disc, whereas Mozilla 1.5 came
out a few days after Mandrake “went to press”.
…. More info to come
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