Waiting for 2008

Hey guys,

2008.0 was scheduled to be released on 27 September, but there were so many critical bugs that it hasn't been out yet. That's no surprise to me as there have been so many delays to the older versions. A bit disappointed, but I'd rather wait than getting an unstable release.

In the meantime I'll tell you how I could move the big DVD isos from one computer to another with just a 2GB USB flash. It's really easy with the following wonderful linux (or rather, unix) commands:

- split: This command helps you split a file into smaller files of equal sizes. The most important option is -b which specifies the file size, with the following multiplier suffixes: b for 512, k for 1K, m for 1 Meg. The beta2 DVD iso was 3.1GB, so I splitted it into 2 files of 1600M each:

split -b 1600m mandriva-linux-2008.0-free-beta2.i586.iso

This command will produce 2 files named xaa and xab.

- cat: Not only help you view the file content, this command also joins files together. It is pretty easy to use:

cat xaa xab > mandriva-linux-2008.0-free-beta2.i586.iso

With just 2 commands you can probably get everything. But as the files are pretty big you should use checksums to make sure there's no error in transmission. Linux provides 2 common checksum tools: md5sum and sha1sum. md5sum is faster and enough for everyday use.

PS. There's this really cool sourceforge project that provides ports of many common unix tools for Windows: http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/. Long live the penguin empire :D