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A Tale of Two Distros
By: bilbrey on 2002-09-16 07:15:29
Section 1 - Getting The Code

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The differences between the distributions start before you've even gotten the ISO images or burnt your discs. The good news is that the "Download" link is easily located on the home page of both vendors again. For a while, they hid it to redirect traffic through their site and funnel the sheep into the stores. All better now, though. But finding the beta software is a different story. First, go to the Red Hat site (http://www.redhat.com) and try to find out about their latest beta. In July, when it was first released, it was called Limbo. Now it's called Null. Neither word matches the RH search utility. I had to search Slashdot to find a reference to either. Nothing much useful there, so it's up to me to provide what you need.

You can download it from the beta sub-section of the Red Hat FTP server (look for the "null" directory, as of this writing). Alternatively, you can use one of the Red Hat mirror sites, found here. Note that some mirrors might not carry ISO images, others may only have officially released versions, not betas. Find one that works well for you in terms of coverage and speed, then bookmark it.

Red Hat's Null ISO set is five CD images, all under 650M. You really only need the first three unless you want the sources, too. It doesn't reflect that in the file names, so I didn't know until after the download was completed.

Mandrake, on the other hand, doesn't have a direct link to their download page. Instead, you're required to hit the please pay money to join our club page. There is a link to a dynamic download site at the bottom of that page. From there, I followed the link to the Mandrake 9.0 Beta to get a list of mirrors. As I noted on Graffiti, I ended up using the sunet.se site, which is very fast, even from Europe. YMMV.

Mandrake's Release Candidate 2 for the 9.0 version is three discs, but the first two of those are just under 700M. That is, you can't burn these images to standard 74 Minute CDR's. This is a problem for people like my compadre, Greg, who has several hundred of those laying about, but none of the 80-minute type.

If you haven't got a fast pipe (that is, no broadband: Cable, DSL or better) or a CD writer of some kind, then you don't want to try fetching these down yourself. There are other options, though. For example, CheapBytes sells CDR versions of both. Here for Red Hat (um, I mean Pink Tie, the secret code phrase meaning RH download images), and over here for Mandrake's 9.0 RC2. Cheapbytes will generally have discs available a week or two after they're out on the public servers. Recommended.

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