Download page @Ubuntu.com

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Sat, 2006-12-16 at 17:25 -0800, Baasha wrote:
> I would like to make two points about the Download Ubuntu page at 
> Ubuntu.com:
> 
> 1. There is a long list of mirrors which are divided by countries and 
> regions.  But within those divisions there is no indication of the 
> geographical locations.  The whole idea of having mirrors, I thought, 
> was to enable users to pick the one closest to home in order to take the 
> load off any one server and also to speed up download time.  Sometimes 
> one can figure out where the mirror is by clues in the website address 
> (universities, for instance).  But in most cases there is no clue.  The 
> average user is just going to pick the first server in the list, which 
> defeats the whole purpose.  I would suggest that next to the server name 
> you place a location to rectify this problem.
> 
> As an aside, there no longer seems to be any servers in Canada, which is 
> a pity.  A location in western Canada would be nice.

Hi Baasha, thanks for your comments. I maintain that page. My grand plan
is for something much better than what is current. I'm actually
surprised you only came up with two criticisms.

Regarding the mirror selection list, Launchpad has a mirror probe that
checks mirrors to see if they're still alive. I take the data it
generates and upload it to the website daily. Therefore some mirrors
come and go.

The future is with country based mirrors and DNS and all kinds of other
goodies. So we will make this easier and users won't have to choose a
mirror at all. It will automatically detect their location and give them
a link to the closest mirror. (however, there will be a list that people
can click out to in case they want to see the mirrors)

Our goal is to decrease the number of decisions a person has to make in
order to get the CD onto their computer. Therefore in February (we
think) we will be completely overhauling that functionality of the
website. If you're into fun games, you should start on www.ubuntu.com
and count how many decisions you have to make in order to get a .iso
file downloaded. You'll probably laugh.

Regarding MD5, I wish there was a way to make verifying the integrity of
a file easier. Windows Installer has this capability built in, so that
when you install a file it can detect if its damaged and abort early on.
I doubt we can get so lucky in the near future. Maybe if we distributed
the iso's zipped with a little md5 checker utility for Windows included
in the zip file. It could be a statically compiled utility that grabs
the md5 from the website, checks the gpg signature and then does an md5
of the iso contained in the zipfile. I can't write a program like that,
so I'm not volunteering to do it, just thinking out loud kind of.

Or maybe use jigdo... /me laughs to himself...

Thanks for the feedback, if you have any other suggestions, I'd love to
hear them. I love it when people file feature requests/bugs against
ubuntu-website in launchpad.net
https://launchpad.net/products/ubuntu-website

Some of them we fix right away, some we reject and some we just sit on
for a while, but we look at all of them.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode