linux distros
Bud
Chesterfield, Va
I was gonna download suse 9 from there website but they only have a ftp for that is there a way to get them in iso without buying them from suse for $70 bucks
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Comments
If you don't want to pay $70 for the real CD set then check Ebay.
Each distro is not only a canned set, but each publisher of a distro also tunes things their paid users have issues with first as well as closing security loopholes fast--Mandrake and SuSE have been known to close security loopholes before the knowledge even hits the web, they work very close with users. This all takes money, and some income is needed or the distro will fail for lack of dev funds by some of the best of the thousands of developers out there. The best expect some recompense for time invested.
SuSE, on CD, comes with the latest OpenOffice and about 2,000 programs, on 3 CDs. Unlike with Windows, you are not buying many hundreds of programs for lost of money, the software comes with it. Thought you might want to know that when thinking about things. Those folks who want a free and good linux that you need to do a decent amount of under the hood work with, and want to spend time and learn Linux, often use Slackware or Gentoo after getting something like SuSE or Mandrake or RedHat. Slack is available from LinuxISO. I use SuSE as some things are much easier in it to config than with Slack, and I want to reward SuSE for their good work. I also purchased Mandrake. The Fedora Project is basicly RedHat dev, it is not finalized but RedHat has been doing things long enough that what is there is quite useable on many boxes.
If you want a free alternative, with a steeper learning curve, try Patrick Volkerding's Slackware or try Gentoo. ISOs for those are free. If you want to get your feet wet first, try Fedora Project 1.0 first, and free ISOs of that are available also.
The fastest mirrors I can use, from Florida, are SUNET in Sweden, uio.no in Norway, and Leo server in Germany. I can get full size ISOs in an hour and 5-12 minutes on Comcast from any of these. SUNET gives me an average of 275 KiloBYTES\sec of throughput. uio.no has given me up to 300 KB\sec (bytes, not bits). Leo averages about 250 KB\sec. US public mirrors are hyperbusy, the fastest throughput I get in US is actually about 225 KB\sec late at night from secsup.org (FTP site again). None of these sites will download through IE, you need an FTP client or Opera or Mozilla or Firefox to FTP right with them. They all reject IE.
FTP Voyager comes with a populated FTP server bookmark list, is free to use fro 10-15 days, and if you are needing a bunch of downloads in Windows is worth buying. FTP Voyager, last I updated it, was available through RhinoSoft. Excellent no-adware client for FTP.
Figured I might as well do this for newbies, some will each want part of what is here, HTH.
John D.
True, basicly the only reason for a live CD is to see if the distro you want works with your hardware, and to get a feel for it. It is intended as an evaluation that runs a basic set of the distro's features live so you can play and really decide if you want to make the move to that distro. For newbies, nice way to get feet wet without drowning in frustration when something you do not yet know how to fix goes awry or appears to.
John D.