Bootable DVD of Suse 9.2

Praise the Lord for the Bittorrent network. If you’re not familiar with the Bittorrent protocol, you should check it out the next time you need to distribute a lot of data to a lot of people. In my opinion the single greatest use of this protocol is for exchanging full copies of (open source) operating systems. I found Suse 9.2 in DVD format so I don’t have to waste five CD-Rs each time it’s released anymore. Also, I can take just the one disk with me on the road in case I need to do any emergency installs.

I’m also getting the bootable DVD of Mandrake Linux 10.1. I’m having some issues with the ipw2200 package crashing my Dell 600m and I’d like to see if I can get it running a little better with a different distribution. It’s not that the distro has anything to do with the package software, but the installation of a device driver is so complex that I’m still far short of understanding it.

For those of you who are interested in the Bittorrent network, I recommend Azureus. You have to use your browser to find the *.torrent files (they’re pretty small in size) but you’ll need different software for downloading the real file, and for that Azureus can’t be beat. Named after the poison dart frog (how cool) it runs on virtually every operating system (it’s runs in Java) and it’s fast, secure, and even pretty. It’s a great example of how open-source code can run really smoothly.