I want to try out Ximian Desktop 2, but I cannot find out anything about it's size. I've searched Google and the Ximian website, but I cannot determine the size of the files and I am to much of a newbie to know how to use wget to get it from the Ximian site.

One of my searches took me to a European Linux magazine that said the Ximian desktop was on a DVD in that month's issue and that it was 800 megs!

Is it really 800 megs?!?! I'm on a 56k dialup and, well, you can imagine. The biggest thing I ever downloaded was the 110 meg OpenOffice and that took me a week of suspend/resume in my download manager!

Is it available in a Fedora Core 1 rpm? Can I get it somewhere on CDs if it really is 800 megs?

Taken from the ximian website:

Q: What does Ximian Desktop 2 include?
A: Ximian Desktop 2 is available in a free download or a commercial "Professional Edition".

The free download, available at http://www.ximian.com/download/, includes GNOME, Ximian Evolution, the Ximian Edition of OpenOffice.org, Ximian Red Carpet, a Mozilla-based (Galeon) web browser, fonts from Bitstream and a host of other applications, utilities and tools.

Ximian Desktop 2 Professional Edition, available at https://store.ximian.com/xd2/, also includes Adobe Acrobat Reader, Real Networks RealPlayer, Java 2 Runtime Environment, MS office-compatible fonts from AGFA, one year software updates via Ximian Red Carpet Express, and 30 days of installation support. The professional edition may be purchased for electronic download or in a CD media kit.

So if you browse to ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/

You should find the xd2 directory with all the packages that it comes with. You should be looking at well over 200 megs most likely total for the desktop. I doubt its 800 megs as that DVD probably included applications that weren't associated with it or they added programs, etc.