“Keeping track of Tux…”

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the LinuxTracker! This occasion reminds me of exactly how far things have come in open source.

I remember reading about this new “Linux” in 1991 that anyone worldwide could contribute to, and thinking of how that would change things. I spent time poring over the supported hardware list and went to the site, hoping to be able to download a copy within a few days in order to try it out the following week. This was at a time when dialup was the standard, and you might have ISDN (downloads @ 128k! Blistering!) at your work if you were lucky. I was the only one supporting all of the UNIX-based clients at work at the time, and I had three minicomputers with variants like SCO and AIX and I had been working in UNIX environments for years at this point. The prospect of a UNIX environment on a desktop machine for my own use and configuration, that was free to use, and had source available for modifying and contributing sounded like a geek’s fondest -ehm- pipe dream. The other techs I was working with at the time agreed. They were doing DOS and Windows support with me, and were excited at the notion.

The rumblings of Richard Stallman‘s ideology were becoming concrete. Of course, even today, Linux is not the HURD that he often wrote about, but it’s the closest tangible thing to it.

/Fast forward/ — a few years ago, the landscape had evolved, businesses rely on Linux variants in the server room, several Linux distributions are in common use, and new ones seem to pop up on a monthly basis. F/OSS is available and more than viable on any platform. It is common practice (especially in universities) to create a mirror download point so that if the distribution’s main site is down or unavailable, you can still get it, and hopefully, can find a mirror that’s in your same region of the world.

This was after the RIAA and MPAA started cracking down on peer-to-peer file sharing. More advanced users had started using bittorrent as a better method of downloading and sharing. The torrents are very tiny files that your torrent client uses to find and update a tracker. Once you connect to the tracker and get assigned to a swarm, the downloads are much more effectively, because the shares are data packets of the file/files, rather than a whole file. This makes torrents better for large files like video and, hey, even ISO images of Linux distributions. LinuxTracker was born to take advantage of this. A distributed network of linux users and enthusiasts helping anyone who is interested to download open source software. These are all legal torrents. The writers of all of the software you will find there did the work pro bono, and want anyone interested to be able to get a copy. It’s really a beautiful thing.

The look and feel of the site have changed a bit over the last four years, but the list of available torrents is impressive, the homepage always showing the latest additions and updates. There is a burgeoning community here composed of daily linux users at levels from ‘curious’ to ‘admin’, always willing to help out.

The remainder of the month is being celebrated with almost daily giveaways to registered users from a wide assortment of tech-related sponsors. The consistent growth of the site and community is wonderful, and seeding the torrents is a very simple contribution that *anyone* can make to the FOSS community, regardless of technical ability.

Bittorrents have been around for a few years, and most techies, gamers, and heavy mass-downloaders have been using them for a long while. I thought I would talk a little about bittorrents and basic usage in a more user-friendly way, to help some of those who are maybe a little less savvy, or whose eyes glazed at the word “bittorrent” before finding out how beautiful they can be.

For a full spec description, check out the Wikipedia article.

Basically, there are files, files that people like to share. These are video files, music files, could be a whole CD of digital pictures of your grandparents’ great Alaskan vacation… Whatever the case. Some are rather large, and don’t download to your computer very quickly over the internet. So some different ideas were thrown around to help deal with moving these big packs of bits from one place to another.
There is compression (Windows: Zip, Mac: Sit, Unix: tar.gz), which you could think of as putting a bunch of clothes in a suitcase, then zipping it, and maybe even sitting on the suitcase to squeeze the air out. When you reach your destination, you open the suitcase, and all the clothes that were in there are there again, but they took up less room in transit than they do in the closet at either end of the journey.
There is also peer-to-peer sharing, and bittorrents, Which I am lumping together just for this basic description. There are big differences, but again, this is a basic overview. You are able to do P2P sharing on any file, whether it’s a zipped file, a CD image (ISO), or even a plain text “recipe.txt”. The idea is that a bunch of people from any number of places all over the internet are sharing the same file. To do this, you have a program that can keep track of the file you are after, and who else in the network is sharing it. This program is able to break the file you are trying to get into pieces, and download small bits from many sharers at the same time, which is faster then downloading each piece from one sharer, then requesting the next piece from the same sharer.

You and up with faster downloads, with your same internet connection.

At the same time, the bits and pieces that you already have are being shared with others who are trying to get the same file. People are sharing with you, you are sharing with others. It’s beautiful.

There is a lot of press out there saying that filesharing is illegal, that bittorrents are illegal, and that both are bad things to do. This is entirely untrue. The record industry and the movie industry are waging battle on people who are sharing their copyrighted material. Saying that p2p sharing your “MetalBack” songs or downloading the “Death Hogs Twelve” game by bittorrent in order to get them and enjoy them for free is entirely different from saying that using p2p or bittorrents is wrong.

A really good example of the legal, moral, and correct usage of bittorrents is using them to download OpenOffice or Any given Linux ISO. These projects are Open Source. The developers have designed and built the programs, and do not charge a thing for them. They want people to enjoy the fruits of their labor. The notes on their webpages and in the license areas always admonish everyone to please pass a copy along and share. An excellent Bittorrent tracker for open source downloads is LinuxTracker. There, you can find the .torrent files for any number of flavors of Linux and other open-source goodness. There are also plenty of links, discussion, and info there for all of the downloads, and on Linux and open source in general. Download the .torrent file and start up your bittorrent software, and when the download is complete, enjoy.

Bittorrent software include:

• Bittorrent
• µTorrent
• Azureus

Last friday I left work and was off to pick the girls up, and I stopped at a 4-way intersection.

I got waved through, and as I shifted to 2nd gear, felt something “give”. I lost the ability to shift gears entirely. I made some calls and got M to re-route herself in case I couldn’t get the car home.

As it turns out, a bracket that holds the shifter cables had come apart. Luckily, there was no extesive damage, and the part was pretty cheap. Still, getting the car to the shop, borrowing another car, and putting gas in all these cars (at the rates charged lately) has made for a highly expensive week.

Slax 5.0.8 was released yesterday. I pulled it down with bittorrent through LinuxTracker . They’ve updated the kernel and some stuff with the hard drive installer, but as a live CD, most people probably won’t notice any difference.