Alternate download location

Hi there, does anyone know of an alternate download location for the Picroft image?

I live in China where it’s very difficult to get to anything Google-related, such as the Google drive where the current picroft image resides. I currently can’t use a VPN, and trying to access it using an alternative encrypted network doesn’t work as the file is too big to download.

I recently saw that Picroft is available and have been trying for three days now to download it. I’m very excited about being able to give it a go, and as a former professional programmer and now amateur programmer, I’m very keen on hopefully being able to add some Skills in too, when I can finally get it going.

Many thanks in advance for any assistance,

Bob.

Ah, tricky problem indeed @gardenomuse. Sorry to hear you’re behind the Great Firewall of China.

I think the easiest way forward here is if you let me now what you can get to - such as Dropbox etc, and I can take it from there. The key reason we use Google is that if we host on say a public website, then we cop all the download charges from the website, and with large files that adds up quickly. Same deal with GitHub - if we host it there we have to use a large storage plan.

We’ll do what we can to help :+1:

Kind regards,
Kathy

Good morning/afternoon/evening (delete as applicable) @KathyReid, and thanks for the prompt reply.

Your idea is kind of the same as what I thought of yesterday evening (great minds etc etc), and have got a friend in the US who will download it and then upload to one of my Raspberry Pi servers for me. Don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.

I understand about the reason to host it on Google to avoid the storage costs of such a large file, but wouldn’t using a P2P system avoid these costs as well? This is used by Ubuntu and RaspberryPi.org, and appears to me to be a suitable solution.

Thanks again,

Bob.

Great suggestion, @gardenomuse, we’re considering torrenting some of our larger files - it’s just something that hasn’t come up to the top of our to do list as yet! Really glad to hear you have a solution for getting the Picroft disk image, we’re really interested to hear how you go with it!

@steve.penrod - can we spin up a download server on the new cluster in KC? Seems like a good use of the new resources and there is plenty of bandwidth. Also a good starter project once I wrap the documentation ( which I’m planning to do today ).